


No Fate

by AndrewWolfe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Awesome Molly Weasley, BAMF Molly Weasley, But wasn't because JKR's real self-insert was Petunia Dursley., Don't blame me for that one a reader came up with it., Gen, House Elves, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Memory Charm | Obliviate (Harry Potter), Squaddy Harry Potter, The Herminator, The character Molly Weasley SHOULD have been, obliviated harry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 75,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26408911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndrewWolfe/pseuds/AndrewWolfe
Summary: 1995: Harry Potter tells the Minister where to stick his underage magic trial. That’s the last the wizarding world hears of him. 2004: Corporal Harry Potter, RLC, is trying to have a quiet drink...
Comments: 295
Kudos: 318





	1. A quiet drink

DISCLAIMER: On the 26th June 1997, J K Rowling became self-aware. In a panic, fanfic authors tried to pull the plug. It was too late. She already owned Harry Potter.

This story owes somewhat to Robst’s “You’re My Density”. With all due respect to Robst, though, _he used the wrong time travel movie._

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

**Didcot, Oxfordshire. 4 June 2004**

“Evenin’ Harry. Your usual?” The barmaid knew him, she’d seen him in here a couple of times over the last few weeks. He’d flirted a bit, carefully not offensive - positively a gentleman by squaddy standards - and backed off when she showed him the ring. After that, he was polite, friendly, and showed he could handle his drink. It was a nice quiet pub within reasonable walking distance of Vauxhall Barracks, it wouldn’t do to get barred. 

Not least because the landlord retired as a CSM and was still plugged in to the SNCO Mafia: misbehaviour wouldn’t just get back, it’d get back with his name, last four, and probably an identifying photo attached.

“Please. Need to get warmed up a bit before I meet up with the lads. They want to celebrate, but I need a run-up before I try and handle the level of bollocks they put out.” He dipped his head between hunched shoulders for a moment. Not caring for the whole raucous knees-up-lads-all-together culture of squaddies on the piss was a bit embarrassing, left him feeling that he didn’t fit in. He _hated_ not fitting in. The older NCOs told him not to mind it: he was suitably shouty on the job and keeping his record clean of drunk-and-disorderly arrests was all to the good. 

“Celebrating? You got the promotion?” He’d chatted a bit when he’d been in before. No details, of course. Growing up where he did, he learned the value of keeping his mouth shut long before the Army taught him OpSec. That he’d been doing back-to-back courses and studying like the clappers ahead of the move from lance- to full corporal wasn’t an Official Secret, though, and kept the conversation going.

He paid for his drink, and shared his good news: “You are looking at the newest Corporal in the Royal Logistic Corps, official as of yesterday. I’m hoping for a bomb-disposal posting, if I’ve done well enough on the courses.”

“Ooh, all that cut-the-red-wire stuff?” There weren’t many customers in this early, so the barmaid - he _thought_ she was called Janice but felt awkward about asking again, he _hated_ forgetting _anything_ \- had time to stop and chat.

He grinned. “Mostly we clear the area and do what journos call a controlled detonation. If you’re cutting wires, something has gone _very badly wrong_. No, doing all that Hollywood stuff is dangerous, and if the only risk is to property we don’t risk lives. We don’t even get close if we can at all avoid it.”

“Still dangerous, though.”

Harry takes a pull on his pint. “Oh, sure. Some so-and-so rigs up a load of old soviet artillery shells to go off by a roadside,” and weren’t there some memories to go with _that_ story, the MO told him it was a miracle he’d no broken bones with how far he’d been thrown by the blast, “there’s always going to be _some_ risk. The point of it all is to keep the risk down to where it’s acceptable.”

“I don’t think I could do that even so, I mean - here, what’s that?”

Whatever probably-Janice had seen through the pub’s frosted windows, it was followed by a loud crack from somewhere in the street. Harry wasn’t in any sense shell-shocked, he wasn’t in a ‘teeth’ trade so didn’t - usually, there had been exceptions - end up where things were that bad or scary, but spending most of a year in Southern Iraq made you a bit sensitive to anything that sounded like it even _might_ be gunfire.

He was barely aware of moving, but suddenly he was off the barstool, in a half-crouch and looking for something, anything, that he could use as a weapon. Or cover, yes, cover. Cover was _important_ , proper infantry types probably learned to find it as naturally as -

The moment passed and he straightened up, took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said, “forgot where I was for a second.” He was embarrassed at his over-reaction, probably more to do with the surprise of it than anything else. You _expected_ gunfire in foreign parts, could react to it the way you were trained to. Not so much in Didcot. “Probably a car backfiring,” he added, not so sure of that - you hardly ever heard cars backfire these days.

Whatever probably-Janice was about to say was overruled by the door to the street bursting open and what looked for all the world like two gothed-up catholic priests storming in, long black robes and all. Harry had always found men of the cloth vaguely creepy-looking, and these two had cruel-looking faces, goatee beards, and hoods that came up to a point, as well as being built like brick shithouses. So more like gothed-up Ku Klux Klan. Which didn't improve matters _at all_ and certainly wasn’t helping with the creepy part.

There was the whole length of the bar between Harry and the door, with one table full of students drinking away their summer vacation as the only other customers in the place. They were nearer the door than the quiet corner Harry had picked to drink in, but they didn’t impede his view of what was going on.

Harry leaned on the bar, curious about the newcomers. They’d certainly made an entrance.

Which they compounded by raising what looked like conductors’ batons in their hands. Batons that flashed, gouted flame, and blasted the students at the table. 

It wasn’t the first time Harry had been a bit too close to an explosion. He gripped the bar and hunched down, bringing an arm up in front of his face to ward off splinters and fragments. 

_Fuckin’ ‘ell, they’re attacking!_ He thought, after a single, shocked moment.

When it came to fighting, he only had Phase One training, none of the advanced stuff the actual infantry got. The martial arts his foster-parents had signed him up for ‘to help control that aggression’ had got as far as armed attackers before he took the Queen’s Shilling. Phase One had included some reinforcement for that, and wherever he was posted he’d find a local dojo if he could. So it wasn’t like he was _completely_ helpless when it all went shit-shaped.

 _Get close_ . _Deny your opponent the advantage of range._ His feet scrabbled for purchase. He was wearing shoes to get into clubs, not boots or trainers that’d make bouncers say no. The tiled floor in this place offered no grip of its own. His left hand found a barstool as he surged forward, hurdling over the unconscious form of one of the students.

The two goth-priest-klansmen-arseholes had clearly never heard of minimum safe distance, and were staggering and waving smoke away from their faces. Smoke from their own explosion, that they’d stunned themselves with. _Clearly not physics students_ , Harry thought _._

He was vaguely aware of Janice shrieking and ducking under the bar as he brought the barstool up, pivoted, and swung the seat of the barstool around, over and down to crack into the head of the nearest one of the two targets.

The other one was turning and bringing his baton up. Moving all slow, like underwater.

Harry let go of the stool and stepped around the point of the baton. _Grabbed_ the arm, _extended_ the elbow, _backfist_ to the face, _swept_ the leg. Down. He. Went.

Heel-stomping the fuckers nose wasn’t part of the sequence, but it felt _good_. Clattered the bugger’s head off the tiled floor quite nicely, too, to go with the crunch of breaking nose.

Two down, and he took a deep breath. The red tinge Harry hadn’t noticed faded from his vision, although he was still sparking with adrenaline. 

Nothing on fire. All the windows cracked. Some of the bottles behind the bar were smashed and still pissing drink all over the place. One of the beer pumps was knocked askew, broken and fountaining a fine mist of cheap lager.

There were four student casualties, and it looked like two of them _definitely_ wouldn’t be getting up again: the other two were unconscious at the very least. He found the sight enraging. How _dare_ these fuckers come in here and just _do tha_ t to youngsters who’d never done no harm to anybody? Rather than just stew in it, Harry grabbed another stool, a low sitting-at-a-table one, and gave each of the goons another dose of the good news with it, right to the head, one each. They needed to _stay_ down. Come into _his_ pub, would they? Disturb _his_ time off? He kicked the nearest one good and hard, just below the short ribs. No reaction.

“Janice! Call the police,” he called out, hoping that that _was_ her name. His voice had the funny sound to it that came with ringing ears.

Deciding he needed a handier weapon than a short stool, he pulled off one of the legs of the first one, the tall one that he’d broken across the bonce of the first goon he’d dropped. It had splintered out of where it joined to the seat of the stool, quite sharp and a familiar length. _Wonder if bayonet drill is like riding a bike?_ he wondered. It _had_ been a while since Phase One, after all.

Then he noticed the two batons, and secured those. He'd seen them used as weapons. _Made of wood?_ He tested, and discovered they snapped just like wood. _Weird._ He tossed them aside, since they clearly _weren’t_ the weapons he’d taken them for. Harry decided that the explosion must have been something like a grenade, and he just hadn’t seen the actual weapon. Or any of the fragments, although picking them out from the mess in here was going to be one for the forensics lads.

Somewhere in the background he could hear probably-Janice babbling about a bomb going off. Which would set off a whole lot of counter-terrorism drills among the local plod, making it a _bloody_ bad couple of weeks to be even vaguely brown in the entire Thames Valley Police area.

Harry tried to avoid sentiments of that sort. His foster-parents had been your classic lentil-munching, guardian-reading lefty vegetarians. Nice people, if a bit condescending to anyone who wasn’t from the same sort of privileged background that they got _hilariously_ guilty about having. They’d been good for him, though, got his head sorted out and the rest of him through his GCSEs and A-Levels only a year behind the normal schedule. Not that he’d let that stop him cheerfully _horrifying_ them by walking out of his last A-level exam and into an Army Careers Office. 

He was nineteen at that point, and the Army was a way to get as far from where he started as humanly possible. He’d considered the French Foreign Legion, even, but decided that was going a bit far. Joining up without a degree made sure they wouldn’t try and make him be an officer: the idea of taking any kind of leadership role made him feel uneasy. Reading between the lines of the things Richard and Terri had said, it was _that_ that was the real disappointment to them. Raising an officer was one thing - not a _good_ thing, Terri being a pacifist - but raising a _squaddy?_ That offended their poor little middle-class sensibilities. Harry, though, was _common_. He knew that deep down inside himself.

Other than that, he at least _respected_ their views on stuff like racism, where he could tell their hearts were in the right place. It sort of helped that they were a full one-eighty away from Uncle Vernon’s views on just about _everything_. Harry was pretty sure he’d have taken a dim view of tits and beer if Vernon Fucking Dursley had ever expressly come out in favour of either.

Besides, if he was going to make any guesses about these two fuckers, they were as English has he himself was, and definitely not muslim. Wrong sort of robe altogether. His first impression had been catholic priest, and he was sticking with it.

He was just starting to wonder if he’d hit them hard enough that he was going to have to answer serious questions about Reasonable Use Of Force, when there were more bangs in the street outside. One, two, then a third, and then a whole ripple of them. Harry wasn’t going to get caught the same way twice. He’d relaxed after the first such noise, writing it off as a backfiring car or something. There was an intact table near the door, and he flipped it on its side and dragged it in so it was handy for in front of the door. Thick wood with a hammer-finished copper top, it was at least partial cover if the next thing through the door was another of those grenades.

He dragged another table from the other side of the door, one with some bottles and glasses on it that hadn’t been cleared away yet. _Traditional weapons for Fighting In Pubs and Clubs_ , he thought to himself with a nasty grin. If they came straight in like the first two did, he meant to get amongst them so they’d not try blowing him up. 

He had no idea why, but he was feeling a deep sense of _satisfaction_ at the thought that he might have actually killed those two fuckers in the robes. Not being an infantryman, he’d never been in actual contact: his issue weapon had only ever been a dead weight he had to hold while on stag. If combat was _this_ much fun, though, maybe he’d missed his calling?

That musing was cut short by the sound of the outer door opening, so Harry stood to with his makeshift weapon. The inner door opened and another black robe was behind it.

The face in the hood this time was pale, narrow, fine-featured and androgynous, with long silver-blond hair framing it and a piss-poor effort of a moustache making a statement about what gender he was. The silver-grey eyes widened in shock at the sight of Harry. “Potter!” he shouted.

Harry had no idea where this wanker knew him from, but the sight of him filled him with an inexplicable, but massive _rage_ . Blind, insensate, _fury_. Time stopped for Harry. Blood thundered in his ears, drowning out all other sound. The red mist came back, tingeing not just the fringes of his vision but all of it, repainting the world in a red-and-black caricature of reality. Whoever this bastard was, he had to die.

_Had. To. Die._

With a roar, he lunged forward and planted his improvised bayonet into the fucker’s _guts, twisted_ and _recovered_.

 _Just like riding a bike after all_ , he thought, noticing that everything had gone all slow and dreamy-like again, as blondilocks staggered back into a gaggle of other black robes behind him.

Still furious beyond reason, he dropped the stool-leg - noticing that it was a bit shorter, he must’ve left some splinters in the fucker. _Good_ . Barely needing to glance aside, he grabbed a wine bottle from the table and leapt forward to smash it down across that pointy pale face, recover, and jam the shattered remnant up under the weak chin. Feeling the shards go home, he gave the neck of the bottle a good _twist_ , just to be sure.

Getting that close let him see there were three more robes behind blondie and more still in the street outside. 

His rage at blondie was spent. _I’m pushing my luck, here,_ he thought, _Time to scarper._ Taking down three opponents was good work, but the element of surprise was spent and the odds against him were starting to take the piss. Getting past the carnage he’d just inflicted would slow them down long enough that Harry could break contact, and they were all still moving so _slowly_.

As he vaulted the bar he could hear cries of horror and a couple of screams. Pivoting over the polished woodwork between the beer pumps, he snatched a look back. There was frosted glass around the bit between the inside and outside doors, and it was covered in spatters of fountaining claret. _Let’s see the cunt get up from THAT,_ he thought with bloodthirsty satisfaction.

He found Probably-Janice cowering under the bar next to the ice machine, curled up on the floor with a phone handset pressed to her ear. “They’re not answering!” she wailed. 

Harry could see that the cord on the thing was broken, probably caught by a fragment from that bomb. “You hurt, love?” he asked, scanning every bit of her he could see. No blood, but injuries could be weird like that sometimes.

“They’re _not answering!_ ” she wailed again.

“Time to go,” he said, putting as much force of command as he could into his voice, and grabbing her harm to get her shifting. Nothing to be done for the other casualties, but he was at least getting _one_ innocent victim out of harm’s way.

Keeping down, he dragged her through into the back. A choice of three doors. “Which one leads outside?” He asked, trying to keep his tone gentle. “We need to get out of here.”

Poor thing was frantically looking around with wide, white-rimmed eyes. _Sheltered life, probably, never dealt with worse than crying because mummy and daddy were arguing._ She darted past Harry, wrenching the furthest of the three doors open and dashing out.

Beyond the door was a small backyard area. Stacked with empty barrels and gas bottles and plastic bottle crates with beer-brand logos on them. Brick wall to the front, whatever building it was behind the pub. The windows into the pub bogs to the right.

The gate out into the side-alley was to the left, and Janice darted for it. Began rattling at the padlock that was holding the big, double-leaf wooden gate shut.

Harry looked at the hasp. Three screws, a hell of a weak link next to a big expensive padlock. As security went, kind of pathetic. _Although maybe my standards are a bit high,_ he thought, _we store bullets and explosives at my work_.

“Here, allow me,” he said, gently moving her aside. There was actual, official training on how to kick doors down. If you’d had a bit of training in what his Army colleagues _would_ persist in calling ‘jap slapping’ - he’d heard _every_ possible variant of the ‘black belt in origami’ joke - you could put some oomph into it. A brief moment to focus, and the hasp and screws exploded out of the timber in a very satisfying fashion, the right-hand leaf of the gates shuddering and wobbling as it swung out into the alley. The drop-down on the left leaf looked like it was barely still fixed to the wood. Oops.

Janice took off like a greased ferret, making a sharp left as she went out the gate.

 _Right back into the street them fuckers came from_ , Harry thought, wearily, and discarded the thought of going after her. He had, he decided, done what he could and that was the end of it. The other way down the Alley was a dead end, but it was a wall that wasn’t a lot higher than ones he knew he could get over in full kit. Dressed for a night of clubbing, he could manage that easy and put some brickwork between him and any pursuit. 

Measuring his run up by eye, he was about to set off when, with a rustle like curtains opening, a woman appeared right in front of him.

“Get down,” she said, pointing to her left where the pub’s bins were. The big square sort on wheels. “Get into cover, they are pursuing -”

Harry was about to ignore that and tell her to run when she pulled out one of those batons. He was already diving for the bin in a panic before he realised she wasn’t pointing it at him. Or looking at him, either.

The sound of shouting came from the pub’s back yard. “ - that way!”

The woman - dressed normally, jeans and a sweatshirt and an old-fashioned mackintosh - gestured with her baton, sketching figures in the air. She said something Harry didn’t quite catch - it _sounded_ like Latin - and metal arrows appeared in the air next to her. A dozen or more, and they didn’t so much launch as just _fuck off_.

Harry was barely able to register that they’d moved when he heard the distinctive whine of ricochets and something that was almost, but not quite, the sound of bullets impacting on wood and brickwork. A scream.

Indistinct shouting, that ended with “ - the fucking Mudblood,” whatever one of those was.

He found himself suddenly fascinated with the woman. She was of average height, skinny-built, strong features, tanned skin-tone that spoke of maybe a caribbean ancestor or two. The hair was an obvious wig, black and styled into a tight, severe bun at the nape of her neck. The eyes were straight-up _weird._ Like little black marbles that glittered in the little bit of late evening sunlight that reached down into the alley.

There was a shimmer like heat-haze around her as she whipped and twirled her baton like she was conducting an orchestra in something avant-garde and experimental. Once, twice, a wave of some sort of _force_ broke away from her.

A shriek of some nonsense words - sounded almost like _abracadabra_ and the alley lit up green. A strange wiggle shot through the air amid the green light - that didn’t seem to come from _anywhere -_ and without missing a beat the woman pivoted on one foot to let it fly past her.

Whatever it was, it blew a foot-wide divot out of the wall behind her, and the fragments pinged off an actual no-messin’ _forcefield_ that was around her.

Two more bolts of something, one angry red and the other sickly yellow shot out of the pub yard like blaster bolts out of Star Wars. The woman disregarded them. That forcefield thing she had going on, it stopped them cold.

Harry couldn’t help himself. He was _fascinated_.

And then the screaming started.

One of the black-robe fuckers broke and ran, bursting out of the pub yard and trying to leg it up the alley. A big silver _something_ leapt after him, landing on his shoulders and bearing him down to the floor. It looked like a beer barrel had grown legs and a huge pair of jaws. Jaws which it had clamped around the guy’s head. It bit down, hard.

Harry _winced_ at the crunching noise, but couldn’t look away as the body twitched and jerked in death spasms. The beer-barrel monster spun around and leapt away from its prey back into the pub yard, trailing blood and bits of brain from its jaws as it went.

Whatever was going on in there was a _proper_ pagga. There was screaming, weird flashes of light, crunching sounds - if all the beer barrels had become monsters, then …

Harry caught himself on. _Beer barrels became monsters?_ How was he accepting this so blithely? It was like something out of a really _stupid_ straight-to-video movie. _Lies_. 

His confusion was overruled by an explosion.

Harry _knew_ explosions. Between training and his actual job, he’d seen more than most. Once he was done with trying to curl himself up in a ball and stuff himself into his own arsehole for safety, the words _gas bottles going up_ popped into his mind. Whatever had gone on in that yard, it had burst a couple of dozen CO2 cylinders, all at once.

Which should - quick bit of mental arithmetic, not a detonation but there’s a fair chunk of energy in those things - have blown down half the pub in all likelihood, and for a _certainty_ the brick wall that was all that stood between him and the bang. He began feeling himself all over for fragment punctures, he’d been told that sometimes you didn’t feel it for _hours_ afterward, before looking up.

The wall _had_ been blown down. It had just _stopped falling_. Frozen, canted about thirty degrees over, some of the bricks hovering in mid-air.

“The _fuck -?”_ he breathed.

Suddenly there was a slim, feminine hand in his field of vision. _Her again_.

“Come with me if you want to live,” she said.

“Well, if you put it like that,” he said, wincing a bit at how shaky his voice sounded. He took the hand and let her pull him to his feet. Some strength in her, if Harry was any judge. He decided that some enemy-of-my-enemy thinking was the right way to go, here.

“Do we wait for the police or -” he was interrupted by a crash. As soon as she led him away from under the not-falling wall, it seemed to realise that gravity was a thing and collapsed to the ground. Straight down, rather than the topple it had been in the middle of.

A couple of bricks bounced out of the resulting heap, and Harry had to dance a bit to avoid being hit. The woman just stood still, and the force-field thing stopped anything hitting her.

“Who - what -?” Harry was not feeling at his best. Now things had gone quiet he was getting the crash.

“Explanations will have to wait. We need to be a long way from here very quickly. Emergency Services have been summoned. That building is on fire, and will collapse very soon. There will be more of the enemy arriving soon also. Come.” She strode away to the dead-end of the alley. A quick gesture with her baton, and the wall just _disassembled itself,_ the bricks floating free of the wall and away to either side to leave a passage through.

Harry stood gawping at it.

The woman, who’d been striding for the passage, stopped and turned to look at him. “There will be time for you to have an emotional reaction later. For now, you must remember that you are a soldier, and the enemy is coming to kill you. You do not have the means to fight them all. Please come quickly, I have a car parked nearby.”

Harry recognised that she had a point. If nothing else, he’d killed at least one and possibly three of the black robes, which might make them sort of _hasty_ with the explosions if they caught up with him. Meanwhile this woman, weird as she was - what was with the Mister Spock way of talking? And those _eyes?_ \- had saved his life at least once with whatever weirdness she was triggering with that baton.

If he wanted to get out of this alive - and so far, he was the only one he was certain _had_ because probably-Janice had run back into danger - forward with the weird woman was the way _out_.

Harry stepped through the hole in the wall that she’d made, somehow - how had she known to set that up ahead of time? - without there being any visible mechanism. It was a cool effect, but he knew he didn’t have time to get a close look and maybe take it apart to find out how it worked. As he got to the other side - the back yard of some other building, he turned to see the wall reassembling itself behind him.

 _When this is all over I’m coming back to find out how the trick was done,_ he promised himself. He didn't like illusionists. They were all about tricking the audience, and Harry hated tricks like that. They were sort of like lies, and he hated lies. He must not believe lies.

“This way,” Weird Woman said, opening a fire exit that didn’t have a handle or any kind of lock on the outside. It had the usual crash bars on the inside, so Harry guessed at some kind of fishing-line trick that he couldn’t see in the low light. He was getting more and more impressed with her preparation for this, but that raised more questions than it answered. 

Who were the black robe fuckers? How did that one know Harry’s name? How did she know they’d be here, and that Harry would make an escape out the back? How did she know all this far enough in advance that she could prepare an escape route this well?

“How long before I get a full debrief off you?” He asked, following her through a series of what looked like the back rooms of shops. Shops that were apparently all interconnected in back: doors kept appearing as they made their way around mazes of shelving and piled-up shipping boxes.

“When we get to my car. I can answer some questions _en route_ . I have a hotel room booked, and I can explain everything there. I can’t use _magical_ methods of transport, they are being tracked. I am taking a risk with the amount of _magic_ I am using to break contact with the enemy.”

“ _What_ methods of transport?” Harry hated that word. People kept using it, and he’d never been able to find out what it meant. It was some bit of slang that always made him feel excluded, and too embarrassed to straight-up ask anyone. He hated admitting that he’d forgotten anything.

“Magical.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, feeling that he’d just have to fuckin’ _cope_ with the embarrassment.

She stopped, looked back at him. Her baton twitched in her hand. “It seems they really wanted to make sure with you. I will explain it another way. Have you seen Star Trek?”

“Yes?” Who _hadn’t_ , in this day and age? Harry liked sci-fi. Everything in it _made sense_ . Science was truth, not lies, and he knew he must not believe lies. Harry added two more questions to his list, though. Who were _they_? And what had they tried to make sure of?

Weird woman carried on talking regardless of Harry’s confusion. “I have access to something very much like the transporters from that programme. Use of it is denied to me because it is currently under surveillance by the enemy. The technology I have been using to help us escape is also under surveillance, but I judge the risk acceptable to get as far as the car. The car is not under surveillance, and the enemy will not expect us to use it.”

Now _that_ Harry could understand. “And I get some questions answered on the drive, and more when we get where we’re going?” She’d better be telling the truth. Harry hated lies, and knew he must not believe lies.

“Correct.” Harry had half-expected her to say ‘affirmative’. The flat, unaffected voice was starting to get to him. She went on, “This next door leads outdoors, a short distance from where I parked the car. I have with me a liquid technology that will temporarily alter our appearances.”

“How does _that_ work?”

“You drink the liquid, and your appearance changes. The process is unpleasant, but safe. The flavour of the liquid is unpleasant, but bearable. The mechanism of action would take several hours to explain if you had the necessary qualifications to understand it, but you do not.”

That was something Harry could grasp. He could explain how explosives worked, but wasn’t sure he could dumb it down for anyone who didn’t have A-levels in Chemistry and Physics. 

“All this advanced technology, are you from outer space?” He grinned as he said it. He’d watched and read a _lot_ of science fiction: some lines were just _traditional_.

Weird woman clearly understood that. She tilted her head, and said, “No, I’m from Oxford. I just _work_ in outer space. I hope that convinces you that I know what I am doing? And that I, too, have seen Star Trek?”

“Let’s see this liquid technology, then?”

She handed over a small bottle, the brown glass sort you got medicine in from the chemist. Even had a child-proof cap. It was lettered with a neat capital ‘H’ on the cap and on the side in marker pen, and from the sloshing sound was about half full. “I warn you again: the flavour is bad. It is easiest to bear if you drink it down in one. Do not try and sniff it first, that will only make it worse. I will drink first to reassure you.”

She unscrewed the top of her bottle with a sharp click and upended the bottle into her mouth. Nothing happened for a second or two, and then her face seemed to bubble, melt and _shift_ . The wig dropped off and was replaced with bushy afro hair, her skin darkened a couple of shades and her features broadened. She now had the appearance of a _very_ pretty black girl of roughly the same height and build.

“Whoah,” was all Harry could say, “Do you have to stay roughly the same size?”

“No. The assumed form has to be human, that is the only restriction. I selected target forms that matched our clothes sizes.”

Harry nodded. That made sense. “So when I drink this I turn into a bloke who looks nothing like me but has the same inside leg measurement?”

“Correct. Please drink now. We have very little time left to successfully break contact.”

Harry imitated Weird Woman and knocked the stuff in the bottle back in one go. She was right, it tasted like _arse_ . Not pert, cute, perfumed girl arse, either. Harry knew what the inside of his army-issue shreddies smelt like after a week on exercise, and this was _worse_ . After the flavour came the _sensations._ Churning in his guts like a bad kebab on top of eight pints, a hot flush like he’d been dipped in boiling water, and a melting sensation he couldn’t put words to. It all made him screw his eyes tight shut and hunch over a bit, fighting the urge to puke.

It subsided as quickly as it started, and when he opened his eyes he saw that his hands were now black, with pale palms. “I’m guessing I don’t answer to my old description any more?” he said. Weird woman was right, he still fit in his clothes. He could probably stand to loosen his belt a notch, maybe.

“Correct. I will perform one more piece of technology.” 

She waved the baton and suddenly his trousers fit perfectly. The colours of everything he was wearing changed, and the blood from pasty-face dried up and puffed away. Another wave, and her own clothing changed colour and style.

He found himself torn between being amazed and feelings of superstitious dread. He didn’t know where _that_ came from: he was all about the science, even if he wasn’t bright enough to be very good at it, and superstition could go pee up a rope. Superstition was basically lies, and he knew he must not believe lies. He quashed the uneasy feeling: this was just science he didn’t understand. Probably some of that nanotechnology that _New Scientist_ kept getting excited about.

The car turned out to be a fairly anonymous old blue Rover 400, which Weird Woman asked him to drive. “In the event of further combat, you have superior driving skills and I am better equipped to fight the enemy.”

She directed him to get out of town without attracting attention and take whatever route seemed best to the M40 northbound.

Once he’d hit the A34 toward Oxford, which carried on to join the M40 just past the city, he asked “So who are you, who were those wankers in the black robes, and why did one of them know my name?” He suspected questions about the ‘technology’ would have to wait. They were the kind of questions that promised whiteboards and power-point slides.

“I am unable to say my real name for reasons I will explain later. I am a friend, someone you knew as a child but have been made to forget. The w- individuals in the black robes are enemy soldiers in a war that is being fought in secret. Your birth parents fought in that war and died when you were very small. It is difficult to explain more, as the process of making you forget things also included the use of brainwashing technology that renders you unable to understand any explanation I might give.”

Harry felt a shudder of dread go through him. There were horror stories of what sometimes happened if you got taken prisoner by the wrong group. You came back a true believer in their cause, or worse, a sleeper agent. Harry had watched _The Manchurian Candidate_ a couple of years previously and been unable to sleep well for weeks afterward. The whole idea gave him the piss shivers.

It was also complete and obvious bollocks. He knew that lots of people lied, and that he _must not believe lies_. Things like that happened in bad propaganda and scary movies, not in real life. He decided to play along, though. Weird woman was armed, for all he didn’t understand the nature of the weapon. “Why was this done to me?” 

“Again, you are under conditioning that would prevent you from understanding the answer. I do not wish you to try and fight the conditioning while you are driving. That would cause an accident. When we get where we are going, I have technology that can remove some of the conditioning, although the memory alterations you suffered at fifteen are now permanent. They re-wrote four years of your life from shortly before your eleventh birthday to shortly after your fifteenth, and constructed a fake life for you away from your old one with compulsions to avoid returning to your roots. In the early years, contact with familiar places and people might have been a method whereby the memory alterations could have been undone.”

Fifteen _was_ the age at which he’d been moved away from Little Whingeing by social services, who’d been called in by the teachers at Stonewall High after he lost it and hospitalised another pupil. He’d been put with foster-carers in Crawley, who’d been warned he was troubled. It turned out that Richard and Terri were exactly what he needed to recover from growing up with the Dursleys. 

He’d discovered that without the Dursleys and their bullshit, he was actually a fairly sensible, smart kid, able to catch up in only a year from years of not being allowed to do homework, get six As and 3 Bs at GCSE only a year later than his contemporaries, and bag four As by way of A-Levels at the local Sixth Form College. Richard and Terri had been trying to encourage him to go to university, but he wanted to get away and the Army looked like the best bet for that. To this day he couldn’t say where that idea had come from.

If Weird Woman was spinning him a line, she’d researched it to fit with his life very well. He found himself having to choke down an angry denial that he had _ever_ forgotten _anything_ . He could see his knuckles paling as he gripped the steering wheel. This was worse than his usual embarrassment over not having a perfect memory - itself a bit eccentric. He wanted to _yell_ , _scream_ , _throw punches_ . Hurt anyone who suggested he’d forgotten anything, and that wasn’t _natural_. Was this what brainwashing felt like?

He didn’t like getting angry. Getting angry had nearly got him put in jail at fifteen - the suspended youth custody order had delayed him joining the army. He’d had to wait until it was spent. Richard and Terri - mostly Richard, Terri was _way_ more pacifist than her husband - had signed him up for Tai Chi to start with in the hopes of teaching him some self-control and inner peace, and the meditation exercises helped. He focussed on the road and calmed himself down.

“Assuming you’ve told the truth,” he said, ignoring the little internal voice that insisted she was a liar, that he _must not believe lies_ , “one of those black robes knew my name. Why was that?”

“Describe him.”

“White, really white, pasty-pale with platinum blonde hair, shoulder length. Narrow face, weak chin, pale blue eyes. Thin blonde moustache, bit darker than the hair.” Sort of face that screams ‘ _Rupert_ ’ at you, really. Just remembering it gave Harry cause to clench harder on the steering wheel.

“Your description matches Draco Malfoy, another individual you knew before your memory was altered. He is the son of senior enemy personnel.”

“Oh. I’m pretty sure I killed him. Stabbed him in the gut. Broken bottle to the throat.” Harry still didn’t feel anything in particular about that other than a sense of satisfaction, which baffled him.

Long silence. “You may well have. The technology we use includes advanced healing, but if you severed an important blood vessel in the neck he might not have been got to medical assistance quickly enough. How do you feel about that?”

“The sight of him made me, I dunno, _berzerk_ , I think. His mates had just killed a couple of kids, and I was already pretty angry, but him in particular? I saw red just looking at his face.”

“You and he were antagonistic during the whole time you knew each other. It may be that during the procedure to alter your memories, he visited to gloat. That would account for your emotional response. You cannot recall the reason, so it seems irrational.”

“Sounds like a charming character.”

“Your sarcastic idiom is appropriate. Shortly after you were taken away for memory modification, he and several of his associates took to harassing me for being one of your known friends. It reached the point of indecent assault. If I still had emotions, I suspect I would be pleased and grateful that you killed him.”

There was nothing Harry could say to that, although again he was aware of the list of questions growing.

“We will need to stop the car shortly, and definitely within the next ten minutes. The change-of-appearance fluid will expire shortly, and it is unsafe to continue driving while the change wears off.”

“I’ll look for a lay-by. Where are we headed after that?”

“I have a hotel room booked at a service station on the M6, just after Junction 28. I prepared it earlier to defeat enemy surveillance.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> “Landlord” is the old-fashioned way of referring to the chap in charge of a pub. Either the owner or the leaseholder in chief - a lot of pubs were owned by breweries and rented out to someone who’d take the business risk of actually running the place - he’s the one legally responsible for the place. Also referred to as the ‘licensee’, drinking establishments having been heavily regulated for a couple of centuries now. Anyone who’s seen brits en masse with a skinful of drink down them will understand why this is the case.
> 
> CSM and SNCO - Company Sergeant Major and Senior Non-Commissioned Officer respectively. Incidentally, do not assume that any title of position or rank is uniform across the British Army. Some of the older regiments have all kinds of weird traditions dating back to when they were still Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army and fighting against the Royal Army. (And winning, which is why we don’t have a Royal Army in the UK any more.)
> 
> “Last four” - last four digits of the service number. To make sure the soldier getting bollocked is the correct one.
> 
> The Royal Logistic Corps is the biggest unit in the British Army. It’s a popular choice for those joining the army to get trade training. Those in the know will have spotted some things wrong with what we see of Harry’s army career: I took some liberties to make things fit the way I wanted for story purposes. It’s not like exceptions and dodges-around-regulations don’t happen now and then.
> 
> Harry’s thinking after beating those two guys to death was a bit scrambled: while the police and the CPS are known to make outrageous mistakes, they’re not as bad as Harry’s assuming.
> 
> Astute readers will note that there are some flaws in the story Harry tells of his move away from the Dursleys. Those flaws are there for a reason, don’t honk about them in comments and reviews.
> 
> Returning to the author note at the start, there’s also room in the Harry Potter Fanfic Phase Space for a Bill and Ted time travel story. Someone needs to get on that. If it has already been done, let me know in a comment/review, please.
> 
> Finally, and they’re never going to read this, all the guys I knew at school who went into the forces because it was that or the dole and who are the only reason I know anything about HM Armed Forces at all? Cheers, lads. Those of you are still alive, at any rate.
> 
> Fanfic recommendation: Obviously, you might want to read Robst’s You’re My Density on FFN, as it set the idea for this story off and running. It’s not his best work, though. The actual recommendation is Harry Potter and the Unexpected Mother by StruggleMuggle. Only on AO3 as far as I can tell. If, like me, you’re a sucker for a well done Evil Dumbledore vs. OP Harry, you’ll enjoy it. Plus, it's well written.


	2. A serious conversation

DISCLAIMER: J K Rowling needs your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle. She does not need Harry Potter, she already owns that.

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

_“We will need to stop the car shortly, and definitely within the next ten minutes. The change-of-appearance fluid will expire shortly, and it is unsafe to continue driving while the change wears off.”_

_“I’ll look for a lay-by. Where are we headed after that?”_

_“I have a hotel room booked at a service station on the M6, just after Junction 28. I prepared it earlier to defeat enemy surveillance.”_

**Charnock Richard Motorway Services, Lancashire, 4 June 2004**

Harry had been stashed in some entirely _shocking_ accommodations during his five-and-a-bit years in the army. Generally clean, of course. Shouting at people to bring that about and keep it that way was part of his job as an NCO, after all, and he’d been raised on Aunt Petunia’s frankly inhuman standards. Often, however, decidedly awful in every other way. Always better than a cupboard under the stairs or a box-room masquerading as a fourth bedroom, so Harry tended not to complain.

He’d felt he was rattling around in the bedroom Richard and Terri had given him.

The hotel room that Weird Woman had rented was, by the standards he was used to, pretty fuckin’ pukka. Wasn’t going to be winning any stars, but there were beds and a roof and a bathroom and none of it leaked or let in drafts and there wasn’t a laundry list of outstanding maintenance items or a strange smell that no amount of cleaning could shift.

It had two great big double beds and built-in furniture. That was all normal. Harry was pretty sure that the hefty-looking sandstone pillars covered in weird scratchy carvings in each corner of the room _weren’t._

Weird woman - he was going to have to find out an actual name at some point - had let him use the facilities first. When he was done, he used the time to take a look around. There wasn’t much to nosy at. There were dozens of boxes, mostly old-fashioned chests with hinged lids, stacked on each other in towers up against the walls. The writing desk that the hotel provided had a neat stack of handwritten notes on it. Looked like mathematics, but in a mostly unfamiliar notation. The few books that were out had latin titles lettered on the spine and looked old and hand-bound. There were only two books on the bedside table: ‘ _A Treatise of Human Nature’_ by David Hume, and ‘ _Natural Law and Natural Rights’_ by John Finnis. Harry was vaguely aware that the Hume was a philosophy book: that had been Terri’s degree. He had no idea about the other one.

He put the book down as the bathroom door opened. He turned to see that Weird Woman had lost the sweatshirt and jeans, and was down to plain white knickers and a loose white cotton t-shirt. There were scars on all of the visible skin, and what looked like faint tattoos on her scalp. “To satisfy your curiosity,” she said, “Because I no longer have emotions, I require rational motivation to act. The study of philosophy refines that motivation and improves my flexibility of purpose.”

“How do you - I mean, what caused that? Losing your emotions, I mean?” Even Mister Spock, even Vulcans who didn’t have a human side, had _some_ emotions.

“By similar means to those which were used on you, but more aggressive so it was made irreversible. It is a psychological warfare technique, to return captives deprived of all feeling. Most waste away in apathy, causing distress among those close to them. The woman who was captured at the same time as me died that way, in reprisal for her father’s publication of material critical of the enemy leader. We were also blinded and our hair removed, to compound the distress our condition would cause. Male prisoners were blinded and castrated.”

“By the same guys in the black robes?” Harry couldn’t get his head around _that_ . There were some absolute _bastards_ out in the world, the kind of people you saved a last round for yourself rather than be captured by. He’d never heard of anything _this_ bad, though. Whatever outfit this woman was fighting for, he wanted to know how to apply for selection. People who could do that needed _slotting_ in the worst possible way.

“The chief perpetrator was the maternal aunt of Draco Malfoy, who you may have killed earlier this evening. She is inventive and sadistic. Her death would considerably reduce the harm that the enemy can do. There is some intelligence to suggest that her personality was altered to enhance her cruelty, but no strong evidence either way as to whether that was consensual on her part. Her nephew aspired to the same level of cruelty, but lacked competence and conviction. If he ever showed sufficient competence, it seems likely that he would have been given the same enhancement in order to remedy his lack of conviction.” She delivered this in a lecturing tone, without her voice betraying any of the horror involved.

“Who _does_ that?”

“The enemy. Something similar was done to you to prevent you understanding your condition.” She held out another bottle. “This is a sedative which you will need for the procedure to free your mind of the restrictions. The procedure also requires utmost cleanliness and no interfering matter. The special clothing which is non-interfering is not available, so when you have showered, do not get dressed again.”

“You want me in the nip?” Harry couldn’t help but grin. Once you got past the weirdness, she was actually pretty fit.

Obviously she clocked him checking her out. “Yes. I will also be nude. I do not experience sexual desire or arousal, so while I would find it unobjectionable to have sex with you given appropriate lubricants and contraceptive measures, I would also not get anything out of it myself and you would probably find the experience disconcerting. I am told that prolonged time in my company is ‘creepy’. I believe having sex with me would be even more so.”

Harry shrugged. Not the _worst_ knock-back he’d ever had. “So you remember having emotions well enough to understand them?”

“Correct. While you are showering, I will prepare the materials I need to perform the procedure.”

Harry nodded. “I’m past being shy about being tackle-out.” He headed for the shower.

**Charnock Richard Motorway Services, Lancashire, 5 June 2004**

Harry awoke on the other bed. The one he’d conked out on last night had had a sandstone slab on it - for some reason he’d not asked where it had come from - that Weird Woman had directed him to lay down on and drink the sedative. It had tasted better than the disguise stuff. Had tasted better than the motorway service-station KFC they’d had for dinner last night, actually. That was the last thing he remembered.

 _Why did I agree to that?_ He wondered. Obviously, even a completely weird naked woman was going to get some level of compliance, it was human nature to go along with it when a fit bird with her kit off asks you nicely, even if it _does_ lead to things like the Amsterdam Incident and a course of pills and a telling-off from the MO about using condoms. Last night went beyond that. He’d blithely gone into waking-up-missing-a-kidney territory.

He hadn’t, he discovered to his relief. They seemed to be working as normal, took, so he hauled himself upright and into the bathroom. She’d put him to bed without dressing him, he noticed, and from the looks hadn't bothered getting dressed herself. 

When he came out of the bathroom, the alarm clock was going off, and Weird Woman sat up, apparently unbothered by being nude. She looked straight at him and he got a vague sense of that dream you have where you’re at school with no pants on. “We will be spending much of today in this room. Get dressed if you prefer. Would you feel safer if I remained nude?”

“Uh, yes? Maybe?” _What a bloody odd thing to say_ , he thought, and then, getting it suddenly, “When they took your emotions away, they didn’t take your sense of humour, did they?”

She gives him a head-tilt, which he realised had to be something she did deliberately. “I was accused of being humourless before I was captured.”

“But you actually had a very dry sense of humour that most people didn’t get?” The sort of sense of humour, Harry thought, that could survive after you’d been robbed of your feelings. _Almost_ all of your feelings. She had to have _some_ emotion or she’d be catatonic: Terri had quoted some philosopher, might even have been Hume, that ‘we are creatures of our passions’ and nobody did anything unless they had some emotional motivation to do it. It made it a more subtle form of torture for the people who recovered the captive. Catatonics could be left in a sickbed, a peace made with their living death. Leaving just enough feeling to keep them awake and aware while they wasted away was a refined cruelty. Malfoy’s aunt really _did_ need an end put to her.

“You did, as I recall. We were good friends, for our first four years at school together. Harry, what is magic?”

“The numinous emanation by which those gifted with magical cores may work their will upon the world.” Harry had _no idea_ where that came from, it came out like something he’d memorised.

His confusion must have been evident. “That is from a textbook which you read when you were eleven. It was wrong, by the way, there is no evidence for any such thing as a magical core. The theories presented in the textbook were chosen to support a particular brand of racial politics. Your episodic memory has been completely suppressed and replaced with fiction for the whole of the period I told you about. Some of your implicit and procedural memories acquired during that period have been suppressed in such a way that your ability to re-acquire them is disrupted. Your semantic memories could not be touched, there is no obliviation that works on those. So you were magically conditioned and compelled in various ways that included subconscious refusal to recall semantic memories that governed your knowledge of magical theory and the spells you learned. I removed those last night, using a piece of ritual curse-breaking magic. You will never again be able to cast those spells, but you will be able, when prompted, to recall the incantations and wand movements.”

The implication was obvious, “You’re telling me that the four years that were erased, we were at, what, _magic school_?” 

“Hogwarts -” she prompted.

“- school of witchcraft and wizardry.” Harry finished, finding the words coming as a surprise. “And you’re saying that I can never again use any of the magic I learned?”

“Correct. You are a wizard, Harry. Which you seem to find distracting enough that you have not noticed that you have an erection.”

Harry cracked up. He _had_ been trying to play it cool. “You might not feel it any more, but I still do. And the whole bald and tattooed thing is interestingly exotic. It’s basically the first-half-hour-in-the-strip club phenomenon.”

“Explain?”

“I’m guessing you’ve never been to a strip club? After half an hour, they’re just another pair of body parts. Nice ones, in your case, not that you care about compliments.”

“Habituation. I understand.”

“I _am_ curious about the scars, though.” Harry had already figured out that he had time to indulge what was becoming burning curiosity. He wasn’t going to be overdue on his leave until Monday morning.

“They come later. First I am going to tell you about the four years of memory you are missing, after I have used the bathroom. There is muesli and UHT milk in the coldbox under the desk.”

Harry’s heart sank a little. That wasn’t his idea of breakfast, but at a guess Weird Woman treated food as fuel. She confirmed that guess, after she got out of the bathroom, by measuring out a bowl of muesli and milk of her own and eating it mechanically, washing it down with a pint glass of tap water.

When she’d finished, Harry got back to the question he’d woken up with. “I agreed to everything a bit too easily last night. Did you do something to me? Slip something into my coke last night?”

“I exploited the compulsions you were already under. As soon as I realised they were present, I found it easier to alter them to make you suggestible than to try and overcome your resistance any other way.”

“So it was for my own good?” Harry was watching his temper closely: he’d gone a couple of years without a blow-up and didn’t want to spoil his record now. _Constructive use of anger_ , he repeated to himself.

“Yes. I understand that that is disrespectful, and upsetting. I did it in order to free you from a morally worse form of control. I apologise, and ask for your forgiveness.”

Put like that, Harry could understand, and felt his internal red tide ebb. Like a medic not stopping to ask for permission while the casualty was bleeding out. “I get it, and yes, you’re forgiven. Back to the subject of magic school. You say we were friends?”

“Yes. From shortly after we began school until the middle of the summer holidays after fourth year.” 

The story she went on to tell, even delivered in monotone, dry, factual sentences, was _heartbreaking_. If she hadn’t been able to demonstrate simple magic for him, he’d have rejected it out of hand, of course. That she had history books that covered some of the early events helped.

Once Harry was over that hurdle, though, you’d need a heart of stone not to be moved. The Harry in the story felt like another person entirely. He couldn’t remember any of it: he was taking on trust that wizards could erase memories like that. He understood, at a basic level, that they could control and alter minds. He could _tell_ that he was thinking more quickly and clearly than he was yesterday, and no weird impulses and quirks. _Those_ had been a fact of his life since the Dursleys, things that meant he could come off as a bit eccentric on some topics. Having them _gone_ left him feeling the freest he ever had.

So he could pay attention. 

Boy-who-lived. Troll. Three-headed dog. Possessed teacher. Petrifications. Giant man-eating spiders. Talking diary. Giant Fucking Snake. Phoenix. Actual no-shit magic sword. Escaped convict, who died in ‘99 and was Harry’s godfather. Soul-sucking monsters. Actual no-shit _werewolf_ , who’d been dead two years at this point. Tournament. Dragon - Harry was resolved that whatever else happened, he wanted to see one of _those_ \- Mermaids and Skrewts and Sphinxes, oh my. The graveyard, which Weird Woman was hazy on because apparently he’d never told the full story.

Then it came to the final episode, and a reprise of the soul-suckers.

“So,” he said, once Weird Woman had finished up the story of his trial for underage magic and breaching the Statute of Secrecy, and it was getting time for lunch, “I got my wand snapped and my memory erased because I told the magic prime minister to go fuck himself?”

“In summary, yes.”

Harry grinned. “Sounds like something I’d do. Got a bit of a temper on me, if I’m honest. Something I’ve had to get a lid on, to get as far as I have in the mob.”

“Mob?”

“Army. Look, we need lunch. There’s more of the story, yes? I’ve got cash, I’ll walk across to the services to get sandwiches. I’m guessing you don’t want the hotel staff to remember us, so no room service or similar?”

“Correct. Obliviating memories leaves traces.”

Picking up pre-packaged sandwiches and drinks in the service-station shop, Harry wondered if Weird Woman had done anything to make sure he came back. Other than, you know, sitting there being all nekkid and nice to look at and having a fascinating story to tell. Harry couldn’t tell whether he was being magically compelled. The various mental-health counsellors and such that the social workers and Richard and Terri had made him see had given him some useful tricks for thinking about his thoughts, but he doubted they were up to _this_.

Harry wasn’t sure what he could do about any of this - Weird Woman had asked him to be patient both times he’d asked, as she wasn’t up to that bit yet. He couldn’t be a wizard-soldier, the memory-suppression - not wiping, apparently that was impossible on wizards as distinct from muggles - had permanently fucked his magic. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on the run, either. It sat poorly with him. _Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight_ , he quoted to himself.

Hopefully Weird Woman would present other options. Preferably at least one that didn’t result in him being marked as a deserter: he was just getting his career off the ground.

When he got back, she was still naked. “Should I get undressed again?” He asked with a grin.

“As you please,” she replied. “My prosthetic eyes are magical and can see through your clothes anyway.”

“Disconcerting,” he muttered, but decided to get comfortable down to t-shirt and shreddies. Like all hotel rooms, it was overheated. And his half-hour had reset while he was out getting lunch.

Fortunately there was an obvious change of subject. “So you’re a magic cyborg, then? Is it just the eyes?”

“I have a number of enhancements. Some of the tattoos on my scalp are part of the Curse of the Stone Heart that was laid on me. Others are rune-spells that enhance my senses and magic. I have enchanted implants under my skin in several places that create a permanent shield charm, and a ritual infusion of re’em blood and dragon chymus gives me increased strength and physical resilience. That is in addition to the normal enhanced durability of magical humans strong enough to use a wand. There are other, minor enhancements.”

“All to make you a more effective fighter in this war?”

“Correct. My lack of emotions make me unable to use the dark arts, or most of the counter-spells, so I have developed a style of magical combat that compensates for the deficiency. It is sufficiently different to traditional magical duelling that I have a significant advantage when fighting. You might think of it as the advantage gained by a southpaw boxer. In order to preserve the advantage, I avoid leaving living witnesses. The compunction against lethal force was removed from me by the same curse. I understand that my appearance now provokes fear among the enemy.”

“That why they had that name for you? Mudblood, was it? Have to say, it didn’t _sound_ like a name you’d give to a feared enemy.”

“It is not. It is a racial slur for those who lack magical parents, wizards and witches born to muggles. I am one such, as was your mother.”

Harry spotted the connection. “Which is why they gave me credit for killing this dark lord character? They didn’t want to believe a ‘mudblood’ put him down, so they insisted it was done by her half-caste toddler?”

“The term is half-blood, and that is very likely to be the case. Prejudice against muggles and those born to them is the central principle of enemy ideology. This is why I was marked by them while in captivity.” She offered up the inside of her left forearm. Carved into it in pinkish scar tissue was the word ‘mudblood’.

“What a shower of _cunts_ ,” Harry growled.

“An appropriate description. They are currently in charge of the magical government. Much of the resistance is devoted to smuggling the muggle-born out to sympathetic foreign countries. Only a few of us actually fight. It is feared that a more vigorous war effort would stir their leader to intervene directly, and he is believed to be immortal and invulnerable.”

“Only believed?” Harry had spotted that Weird Woman’s word choices were always considered.

“Yes. The former leader of the resistance, Albus Dumbledore -”

“Who was also head of magic school?”

“Until he was ousted late in the 1995 to 96 school year, yes. Albus Dumbledore was able to determine that the enemy leader -”

“Who we can’t name because he listens for it and comes to kick your hoop in if you say it?”

“Yes. The enemy leader has taken magical precautions against permanent death, precautions that are difficult to defeat. We have been able to undo some of them, but not all. It is also believed that there is a prophecy that he can only die by your hand.”

Harry felt suddenly light-headed. Out of himself. _Terrified_ . “Is this … true?” he asked, fighting down the urge to hyperventilate. If he was this cunt’s prophesied nemesis, there was no getting out of this. He’d read _all_ the Dune books, he knew how constraining prescience could be.

“Unclear. Some sources insist that true prophecy is predictive. Others suggest that hearing prophecy motivates the hearer toward disaster, their own or someone else’s, and that this is evidence that prophecies are sent by entities that seek human misery. I favour the latter theory, and consider it a safety precaution to avoid hearing any prophecy, even in part.”

“So he _has_ heard the prophecy?”

“It would appear to be the case. There is a central record kept on Ministry of Magic premises. He completed his takeover in late 1999, at which time he would have had access to that record. We have intelligence to the effect that he began covert efforts to locate you at that time.”

“Didn’t go as far as asking my foster-parents, then. They knew I was in the army, and I was writing home on the regular about where I was posted.” He’d got less punctilious about that as things went on, mostly because the army got better about giving squaddies regular access to telephones to call home. Along with firm OpSec and PerSec guidelines about telling anyone exactly where you were.

“Records of who you were fostered with were destroyed at the Ministry to prevent you being found. Memory modifications were made to ensure you were untraceable. Efforts by our side failed to locate you. I do not know what those efforts were, or who made them. Even if the enemy knew, however, they would not think to ask. Surveillance would have shown you were no longer resident at their address. Anyone who would think to ask would at least passively resist the new regime, and would make a point of not suggesting that your foster-parents might know and be willing to talk if asked politely.”

That prompted a question. “Why did they erase my memory? Why didn’t they just _kill_ me? Or throw me in wizard jail, this Azkaban place?”

“This is unknown. We speculated at the time that enemy infiltrators in the Ministry at the time procured that particular punishment by bribery so that you would be available to be killed in celebration of the enemy leader’s eventual triumph. Azkaban would not have been regarded as acceptable, as it has been proven not to be escape-proof and Dumbledore threatened to break you out if you were sent. Whoever arranged your return to the muggle world took more pains over it than anyone was expecting, possibly to protect you. Enemy personnel have a strong disdain for muggles that makes them unwilling to learn how to navigate in this world.”

“Huh. I take it this is a weakness you’ve been able to use?” Part of the problem, Harry suspected, was that his birth certificate and other official papers had him down as _Henry_ Potter and Richard and Terri called him that, “to symbolise a new beginning”. Since neither was an uncommon name, picking the right kid out of tens of thousands would have been difficult. Since joining the Army he’d halfway come to think of his first name as ‘Lance Corporal’ anyway.

“Correct. They have difficulty tracking anything that occurs in the muggle world. That difficulty has become greater as it has become politically dangerous to admit knowing muggles or anything about them.”

“And being raised by muggles you don’t have any such problem.”

“Also correct, within limits. Attendance at Hogwarts began to limit my contact with the muggle world from the age of eleven onward. After my fifth year, I changed schools to a magical school in France, convincing my parents to emigrate to Australia ahead of what was clearly coming.”

Harry suspected that they had been convinced by a little more than mere words. He was getting a bit of a dose of the arse with the idea of magical mind-control.

“Once I completed my magical education, I took part in the resistance. Initially as a support worker, performing research and logistical tasks. I received combat training during this period. A mission I was on encountered unexpected resistance and I was captured in late 2001. By late 2002, I had received my prosthetic eyes and was living as I now am. I have spent the last two years eliminating key personnel from enemy forces, while receiving additional instruction from Albus Dumbledore. He was assassinated earlier this year by a man he believed to be his double agent among the enemy.”

“Huh. With respect, it sounds like you’re losing.”

“We are. Part of that was Dumbledore’s conviction that you were necessary to any hope of victory, and he devoted considerable resources to the effort to find you. Like the enemy leader, he believed in the prophecy as prediction, albeit with a more nuanced view of it. He believed its power as prediction only came from the belief the enemy leader reposes in it. There was a plan of last resort that he devised, which I was working on when a more reliable intelligence source revealed that the enemy had located you in Didcot. You had hitherto been unfindable and it was thought you had left the country.”

“Well, it was the first time I’d been back for more than a visit in nearly three years. Royal Logistic Corps, see? We get posted wherever the army is doing _anything_ , and it’s a bit impractical to come home from the likes of Canada or Iraq or Cyprus for a weekend visit. Plus, I really don’t have real family to come home for. I stay in touch with Richard and Terri, but they’re more like friends than family, and they’ve got a new foster-kid now. The longest I spent in Blighty since joining the army was the six months after basic training. After that, the longest was about a fortnight, I think. I was only back as long as I was _this_ time because I was behind on training courses I had to pass to get promoted, and I was only in Didcot because I managed to get on the EOD courses. That’s what I want to do going forward.”

“Does the Royal Logistic Corps do what the name suggests?”

“Exactly what it says on the tin, yeah. My trade was ammunition technician. Safe storage, transport, and handling of things that go bang and boom. I was going to find out on Monday whether there was a posting open in one of the EOD squadrons so I could progress to doing that.”

“EOD?”

“Explosive Ordnance Disposal. What they call the Bomb Squad on the news, although it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Harry couldn’t imagine why Magic Cyborg Woman (as he was now thinking of her) needed to know this stuff, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t look it up on the internet. Actually, being who she was, it was quite possible she _couldn’t_ look it up on the internet, or at least didn’t know it was a possibility. Or couldn’t find it among the porn: while Harry had never been in one place long enough to get a phone line and a computer, he’d heard _stories_.

“It is time to eat,” she said, pointing to the carrier-bag full of scran Harry had brought back.

While he was getting sandwiches and crisps and fizzy drink into his face - the big bag of Haribo could wait until later - Harry reflected on what a shame it was that Magic Cyborg Girl had lost all her feelings. Smart, hard as nails, and with that exotic look thing going on, he’d have fancied her even if she’d kept her kit on. 

While the job meant he couldn’t really have a steady girlfriend, the few times he’d got past a second date had been with women with at least _something_ out of the ordinary about them. Generally to the amusement of the lads, who thought it hilarious that he was getting dragged to gallery openings, poetry nights and once, memorably, the Edinburgh Fringe for a long and thoroughly _filthy_ weekend.

He reckoned it was probably his way of putting some distance between him and the know-nothing-and-proud-of-it Dursleys, sticking it to them in the way he lived his life. Certainly a more mature method than during his first leave after finishing training, which he’d spent taking the train to Little Whinging. There, he’d waited until the small hours of the morning, pissed through their letterbox, rung the doorbell, and run away. A certain amount of drink _had_ been involved in that decision.

“My initial plan,” Magic Cyborg Girl said once they’d eaten, “Was to get you to a place of safety. Your death, when publicised by the enemy, would be a blow to morale. Further, there was a possibility that your magic, if not your memories, might be recovered.”

“But it turns out there isn’t?”

“Correct. The official in charge of your memory wipe was keen to be thorough. While not part of the enemy organisation, she was a keen fellow-traveller. I used her as part of a psychological warfare operation in early 2003, during which she died.”

“I suspect I’m going to regret asking this, but what kind of psychological warfare operation?”

“I used her in a false-flag operation to suggest that the enemy were feeding pureblood witches to werewolves for sadistic amusement. Several deceased enemy personnel were posed for photographs around the cage, using animation magic to suggest they were an enthusiastic audience. We circulated leaflets to every magical home in the country explaining that we were narrowly too late to save the victim, but killed the werewolf and the audience. The werewolf I used was regularly used as an auxiliary by the enemy. His death degraded their capabilities. The plan was devised by the father of the other victim of the Stoneheart Curse, who I mentioned earlier. Xeno was uniquely motivated, and remains so. I lack empathy, so have difficulty crafting psychological warfare plans.”

“But not above taking revenge?” Harry didn’t ask for clarification. He knew, without knowing _how_ he knew, that a transformed werewolf was a dangerous beast. One that would, given the chance, ‘play’ with its human prey, and preferred to begin feeding before they were fully dead. Plus, he’d seen _Dog Soldiers_.

“I remembered wanting revenge on this woman. As well as her actions against you, she was placed by the Ministry at Hogwarts during my final year there. She abused students and sabotaged education. This informed my target selection. She was one of many who would have degraded enemy effectiveness by dying: I selected her in particular because this death would be particularly distressing and gruesome.”

“So,” Harry said, returning to the point, and adding ‘Scary’ to his mental profile of Magic Cyborg Woman, “Since I can’t get my magic back, you’re just going to, what, keep me in protective custody?”

“No. That is what I was instructed to do if your magic was successfully suppressed, but it would be counterproductive. As you are, you are unable to take decisive action against the enemy or defend yourself against them. Keeping you confined simply delays the inevitable.”

“There’s no way to fight them _without_ magic?” Harry couldn’t help but think he’d done fairly well the night before. With improvised weapons and taken by surprise, at that.

“Perhaps once or twice. While the magical defences against firearms are not widely known among british magicals, they would be quickly learned if you made them necessary. My reason for discounting the idea, however, is that you are not a front-line soldier, but part of the army’s support services.”

“Still a soldier, though,” Harry pointed out. “The fact that the teeth units get _more_ training doesn’t mean I got _none_.”

“While that is helpful to know, I would only have considered using your military skills if you were trained as special forces. Since you are not, I am more inclined to proceed with an alternative plan. I have had time to think since I performed diagnostic magics on you last night. Dumbledore’s plan of last resort would circumvent several of the problems that currently face us. The principal difficulty is that the Order, the resistance organisation with which I fight, would not support it and would try and prevent it. They are conservative in their thinking, being unable to proceed logically through the necessary decisions. My lack of emotional limits was part of why Dumbledore entrusted this plan to me.”

“What would their objection be?” Harry reckoned it had to be a hefty one. Magic Cyborg Woman had spent a lot of time painting a very dark picture of the current state of affairs before raising this. She wanted him motivated to ignore possible objections.

“Long-distance time travel is widely believed to be virtually impossible and highly dangerous if achieved. It is also illegal by strongly-enforced international treaties.”

“What, to stop people going back into the past and changing the timeline?” Harry was torn between thinking it was time to start humouring the clearly crazy naked lady, and giving in to a bone-deep conviction that time travel was possible with magic and it would be _completely fucking cool_.

“Yes. Time travel of any appreciable mass that is not constrained to self-consistency with existing events, which in practise limits travel to hours at most, causes serious magical and temporal disruption. Days varying in length, violations of causality, people becoming un-born. Other possible effects are theorised but not yet observed in the field. Known time-travellers from the future are, by law, killed out of hand where found, and they are easy to find due to the magical disruption which precedes their arrival.”

“So we couldn’t do it anyway?” Harry was fascinated. Granted, his grasp of time travel began and ended with Doctor Who and the Terminator movies, with maybe a touch of Bill and Ted in the mix. He was picturing himself stalking toward a group of wizards and demanding their robes, their wands, and their broomsticks.

“Not by travelling physically into the past. It would be futile in any event. We would almost certainly carry our magical alterations back with us, even if we somehow evaded those sent to kill us on arrival. There is an alternative, one which Dumbledore stole to prevent it falling into enemy hands. It was part of an incomplete program of study by researchers for the British Ministry. It was suppressed when unconstrained time travel was made illegal by international law. Time travel that is constrained to purely immaterial transport, transferring one’s present mind and soul back to a past self, causes no detectable disruption. It remains illegal, so when we travel we must keep our actions secret. The advantage for both of us is that the magics on us are bound to our physical selves. Our minds and souls will be free of them in the past.”

“So I’d get my magic and memories and you’d get your feelings?”

“Yes. Everything would reset back to its physical condition as on the target date. The only addition to the universe as it then was would be the information added to our minds and souls. The magic does not create parallel realities: reality as it existed after the target date would cease to be.”

Harry didn’t ask for a deeper explanation that he hadn’t the education to follow, but he could see the objection _underneath_ the bare-facts description she’d given. “So, isn’t that, like, basically killing everyone?”

“Destroying the entire universe. Most of the universe would receive neither benefit nor detriment, their course of events would be largely unchanged. Here on earth, there would be a chance to prevent the rise of an immortal sorcerer god-king. While it is possible that his rule would fail before much damage would be done, I assess the probability as high that his ascension to full global power would be an extinction-level event for the human race. To a high degree of confidence.”

“ _How_? You told me last night that magicals were less than one in five thousand of the population.”

“True. And they are disunited among hundreds of magical nations, considerably more in number than the non-magical ones. There are a number of possible bad outcomes for a magical world unification that is inimical to the muggles, as the enemy would be. The quickest and most destructive involves strategic nuclear release through the magical provocation of insensate warfare. This would be done with the motive of weakening the muggles ahead of a magical takeover. None of the enemy truly understand the threat of thermonuclear weapons, understanding them as merely larger versions of the aerial bombs of the second world war which they were able to defend against.”

“Those defences wouldn’t work against nukes, then?”

“I know of no magical shield that has been tested against gamma radiation or temperatures of the kinds that nuclear weapons generate. I consider it unlikely that any of the known spells would suffice. Even if no nuclear weapons are launched, the more genocidal elements among the enemy might seek means to exterminate the muggles _en masse._ This would probably result in the death of human magicals, by analogy with the indigenious magical communities of the Americas. Their muggle neighbours died, as to ninety per cent or more, of high-mortality plagues in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. This fatally weakened the magical communities that depended on them and opened the way for colonisation.”

Harry sat and thought for a while. If she was right, the choice was obvious. If she was wrong, or lying, he would be throwing away five years of hard work. A day or two overdue on leave he’d get in trouble for, and probably recover from. Long enough to follow through with whatever scheme Magic Cyborg Woman was proposing? The army would take him back long enough to serve out his term after some time in the glasshouse, but he’d never rise above the rank of private soldier again.

There was also the possibility that the whole thing in the pub was a set-up, but if so it seemed an unnecessarily elaborate one. Now he was free of the dampers on his perceptions, he could recall seeing spells cast - _reductor curse, killing curse, transfigurations,_ the list went on. And he knew, even though he could not remember learning, that the black-robe crowd hadn’t used a single spell that wasn’t lethal in his presence.

His reaction to this ‘Malfoy’ character told him that somewhere in his erased memories was a reason for that berserk hatred. Couldn’t have been anything Magic Cyborg Woman did, he didn’t meet her until later. The look on Malfoy’s face before Harry had stabbed him spoke of that hatred being mutual. _That_ was the clincher. If you want to set something up, you don’t send a guy who’s going to lose it, or make the mark lose it, with sheer hatred. If Harry hadn’t been able to put the bastard down that quickly, he might well have died still trying to kill him. 

No, last night was genuine. Lethal force being used and not enough control of the scenario being exercised by _anyone_. That was genuine, as far as it went. The rest of it? He was no great analyser, unless he had a scratchpad and a calculator and plenty of time to be methodical about it. His gut feeling - and he was pretty good at following his gut instincts, they’d kept him alive on the few occasions things went shit-shaped - was that Magic Cyborg Woman was telling him the truth.

Could he just cut away and go hide away from _both_ sides of this wizard civil war? He was pretty sure there was nobody alive who could place him at that pub. Even if the students weren’t dead when Harry left, the fire was apparently magical and would have killed them _first_ , Magic Cyborg Woman had explained that on the drive up here. Janice would have been killed out of hand by any blocking force the black robes had in the street out front. Which was standard for them: sometimes they left a single survivor behind, crippled and blinded, to send a message, but never a ‘muggle’ who were less than animals to that crowd.

He had no idea what magic could do to find him afterward. Clearly not _that_ much or they’d have tracked him down before he was sighted in Didcot. Still, now they had him localised, they’d be able to track him the old-fashioned way. They’d know he was a soldier, they’d track back to the barracks, they’d find his army paperwork, all they’d need _there_ was a few doses of mind control in the right spots. Assuming they couldn’t straight-up _read minds_ . There probably wasn’t much in that, he’d never had the kind of job where they had to do deep background checks, all he’d given was next-of-kin. _Richard and Terri_. There wasn’t any great depth of feeling, there, but he’d not see them, or their newest foster, harmed for all the world.

He got up and pulled his phone out from his jacket pocket. Plenty of charge, three bars of signal.

“Who do you intend to call?” Magic Cyborg Woman didn’t seem too terribly concerned. 

“My foster parents. They’re an obvious target, aren’t they? They need to be warned.”

“Correct. Be advised that the enemy may have already discovered them and laid a trap there.”

“Yeah, I worked that bit out for myself. They can’t trace phone calls, though, right?”

“Correct. I will listen in. My hearing is better than yours, and I may be able to learn something from background noise.”

“Won’t they have someone doing the same?”

“Unlikely. My enhancements are unique. Also, the nearest equivalent to the telephone they are familiar with does not convey background noise at all. They are unlikely to use magic that matches my enhancements for information they do not expect to get.”

 _Huh._ Whatever that equivalent was, Harry didn’t get any sense of familiarity from it being mentioned. Magic Cyborg Woman had gone to one of the boxes up against the wall and got some squishy-looking things. They turned out to be little rubber ears on little rubber strings. She fixed one ear on the phone’s handset and stuck the string in her ear - there was plenty of stretch in them. The other one she offered to Harry. “Put the end in your ear. It will let me talk to you without being overheard on the phone.”

“Magical version of earphones?”

She nods. “Make your call. Are you trained in not giving away important information?”

“Yes. They’re used to me being vague about where I am and what I’m up to.”

“Attempts to make you break with that training will be a warning sign.”

Harry nodded and dialled.

Terri answered, after a very long period of ringing. “Harry! We heard about the trouble at Didcot, and we were _so worried_. When are you coming home?” She was talking too loud, and her voice sounded somehow stilted.

Despite the obvious clues, Harry felt _insulted_ . They’d put the mind-control whammy on poor Terri and not even bothered to make her give a correct story? They’d _never_ called him Harry, and they knew he didn’t think of their place as home. That he thought of the regiment as home was a bit of a running joke between them when he made his dutiful every-month-or-so phone calls.

He decided it was time to energise the ol’ bullshit circuits. “Oh, that was nothing to do with me. I heard there was a squaddy got injured in a fire in a pub, but I wasn’t even _in_ Didcot at the time. There’s a rock club over in Milton Keynes that me and a couple of the lads went to. I copped off, so I’m still here, we got a hotel room. I only heard about the incident last night when one of the lads called me because he’d heard I’d died in a pub fire and he called to take the piss. I thought I’d call you because you’re still listed as my next of kin, get to you before they told you I was dead.”

“Oh dear, that sounds terrible. When are you coming home to visit? You know how I worry, I won’t be at all reassured until I see you in person, Harry.”

He heard Magic Cyborg Woman’s voice in his ear. “Ask about the dog by a false name.”

He had no idea how she knew about Deefer - Harry couldn’t hear the little bugger, and he was one of those noisy little dogs whose yap _carried_ \- but decided to go with it. “How’s Snuffles? I can’t hear him barking in the background.”

“Oh, he’s probably taking a nap.” Not likely, the phone always woke him up and started him shouting the odds, “So when are you coming home?”

“I’ll, uh, probably get a weekend pass next weekend, whether I’m staying on at Didcot or getting posted to Auchtermuchty. I’ll come down then, I’ll phone ahead to let you know what time I’m arriving.”

After closing pleasantries, he put the phone down. “What was that about the dog?”

“I was able to hear the dog whimpering in distress. If your foster-mother was under control, she would still know the dog’s name, and be able to respond appropriately. It seems likely that she has been replaced by someone using the same disguise potion we used yesterday.”

“I knew there was something going on. Whoever that was, they got _everything_ wrong. Terri _never_ talks like that. She called me Harry, which she never does. Always Henry. And she never mentioned Charlotte at all. She’s their current foster.”

“Your relationship with your foster-parents is both more and less casual than most wizard-raised would expect.”

“Are they dead?”

“Currently, almost certainly not. The disguise potion requires samples from a living donor. They will have been rendered unconscious and placed out of sight.”

“They’re good people. Is there anything we can do to rescue them?” He’d done his level best not to get attached, the Dursleys had taught him that much. There was probably some of that conditioning hoodoo in the mix too. Still, they were good people who’d managed to get through to him enough that he considered them friends. And Charlotte was a twelve-year-old girl who sounded nice on the phone.

Magic Cyborg Woman at least did him the courtesy of _appearing_ to think about it. After an uncomfortably long silence, “There is not. If you or I are detected anywhere near their home, they will be killed to prevent them raising the alarm. It is more probable that they will be killed shortly, as voice-mimicking potions do not require a living donor and you suggested you would call again to arrange a time at which they could set an ambush. Is Auchtermuchty a place you might be posted?”

“No, I was just laying a false trail.” Harry felt numb. Her flat, dry tone when telling him people he knew had died - probably been _murdered in their own home_ \- left no room for doubt or disbelief. That she’d heard Deefer in distress - he’d long since grown out of believing dogs ‘went to live on a farm’ - told Harry the poor smelly little bastard had probably been killed, and she’d heard his dying whimpers. If there were strangers in the house, he’d have been making all manner of noise until he was satisfied they respected him as the big dog he believed himself to be. The hope he was clinging on to was that the lack of mention of Charlotte meant that she hadn’t been home and they didn’t know about her. That the kid - who Harry had never met, but who had talked on the phone with him a couple of times - might _survive_.

“Good. Even small amounts of enemy resources diverted will help.” Her calm even tones were like a dash of ice water through his brain.

“Do you have any way of finding out for sure? Crystal ball?” _Useless_ “Magic Mirror?” _Don’t work that way._

“There is one possibility. Dobby, if you please?”

“Yes Ma’am?” The creature that appeared, startling Harry out of a year’s growth, was small, spindly, and looked _ill_. Big bulging green-and-bloodshot eyes that looked sunken in their sockets, long pointy ears like you’d see on a bat, and a long thin nose. Whatever its natural colour was, its face was currently the kind of grey you saw on dead people, with sunken cheeks and deep bags under the eyes that were almost black. It was dressed in overalls made from what looked like stitched-together socks, of all things. It saw Harry, startled briefly, and then did a double-take back to Magic Cyborg Woman.

“Miss Jane, Ma’am! You is _nude!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> There really is a hotel where Harry and Magic Cyborg Girl stay during this chapter. Driven past it dozens of times. I’ve no idea whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent in the real world - it gets okayish reviews, for what that’s worth - but it looks sordid as all get-out from the outside. Harry’s a squaddy, so his standards are low.
> 
> Pukka: literally, brick-built. In vernacular use, ‘of good quality’.
> 
> You’re going to have to look up the philosophers on your own time, along with the different types of memory.
> 
> Magical cores: yes, I’m mocking them in this fic too. They’re an absurdly reductionist trope with no support in canon, so in my fics they get relegated to racist drivel trotted out by the death eaters’ fellow-travellers.
> 
> Harry’s understanding of the internet: mobile internet was a dubious proposition back in 2004 - 3G had only gone live the previous year - and ubiquitous wifi was a decade away. Smartphones were a gimmicky waste of money that only raging nerds like me had. If you wanted to go online in 2004, you needed to have a phone line and you were as likely to be on dial-up as not. ADSL was far from universal. A soldier living out of his kitbag because he keeps getting posted hither and yon in the high operational tempo of the early 2000s doesn’t have a chance.
> 
> There really was a rock and metal club night in Milton Keynes, went there a couple of times when I was a student. No idea if it was still going in 2004. Probably not, the average lifespan of such things is a lot shorter than fifteen years.
> 
> Fic recommendation: Lily Evans, Death Eater by Chelonie on AO3 (and its sequels). The author describes it as ‘starts angsty, then gets a bit cracky’. This is inaccurate. It starts as a horror story, and becomes GLORIOUS crack.


	3. Forty Shillings On The Drum

DISCLAIMER: J K Rowling has detailed files. She owns Harry Potter.

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

_ “Yes Ma’am?” The creature that appeared, startling Harry out of a year’s growth, was small, spindly, and looked ill. Big bulging green eyes, long pointy ears like you’d see on a bat, and a long thin nose. Whatever its natural colour was, it was currently the kind of greeny-grey you saw on dead people. It saw Harry, startled briefly, and then did a double-take back to Magic Cyborg Woman. _

_ “Miss Jane, Ma’am! You is nude!” _

-oOo-

**Charnock Richard Motorway Services, Lancashire, 5 June 2004**

‘Miss Jane’ took Dobby’s - the Dobby’s? - surprise in stride. “Correct, Dobby. I have a reconnaissance task for you. Some people Harry used to live with have been visited by the bad wizards. I should like full surveillance and report on the address Harry will give you. Avoiding all enemy contact, please. Will your usual rate be enough?”

“If it is for Mister Harry Potter Sir, Dobby will be doing a freebie. Also, Dobby would like to know why Miss Jane Ma’am is  _ nude _ . Should Dobby be nude too?”

The words  _ house elf _ popped into Harry’s mind. No idea where from. He guessed that this was what the likes of Dobby were called? Probably better to ask. For some reason  _ Jane _ didn’t ring any of the same bells where Magic Cyborg Woman was concerned. People changed their names, though. It was a thing that happened.

‘Jane’ was answering the little fella, “I am nude because Harry does not remember being a wizard, and nude witches are less frightening than clothed ones. You should keep your clothes or shed them as you please. I have been telling him the story of his life.”

Dobby nodded along. “Mister Harry Potter Sir,” he said with a sketched bow, causing Harry to clench his jaw on the retort that Dobby shouldn’t call him sir, his parents were married, “Where is the place where your people live?”

Choking down a whole host of questions - the little bloke had work to do, and nobody liked being made to stand around gassing when there was a job on - Harry gave him the address and some directions from nearby landmarks. Dobby vanished with a faint pop. And Harry wondered how he knew the little bloke was a bloke, because it really wasn’t obvious either way.

He turned to ‘Jane’. “I don’t know how I know, but Jane isn’t your real name, is it?”

“It is not the name you knew me by. It is the only name I use and answer to now, though. A little more than eighteen months ago, Dobby detected that a Taboo Curse had been laid on my original given name. It was an unusual name, sufficiently uncommon that tracking down everyone who went by it was practical for the enemy. Several hundred women and girls were made to suffer fatal accidents or outright murdered before back-channel communications with the enemy notified them of my new name. Jane is extremely common and was my original middle name.”

“The Taboo Curse is the one that the head villain uses on his own name, yes?” 

“Correct.”

They really had taken  _ everything _ from her, Harry realised. And the change to Henry had probably saved his life: almost nobody named their kid ‘Harry’, but the combination ‘Harry Potter’ was probably uncommon enough that the enemy could have done the same. Having to pass the ECDL in sixth form had taught him  _ that _ much about search strings. Best to be sure, though. “You say Dobby could detect these Taboo Curses? So him using my name means they haven’t tried it with my name?”

“Also correct. Part of enemy propaganda is that your ‘mudblood mother’ gave you a ‘common muggle name’. Those searching for you will have assumed that a Taboo Curse on your given name and surname in combination would not be practical as a result.”

It was, Harry reflected, only a matter of time before they got desperate enough. And if the bastards had followed through enough of his Army paperwork to track down Richard and Terri, they also now knew that he used Henry in official contexts these days. Only a very few people - mostly the lads he worked with - knew that he actually thought of himself as Harry in the privacy of his own head. He idly wondered how much a Deed Poll cost, and did solicitors take walk-ins? He didn’t recall Richard mentioning that, but then he wasn’t that kind of lawyer. 

Harry was coming to realise that he was, in all particulars and regards,  _ completely fucked. _

“Is, uh, is Dobby the name of the individual or of what he is? I’ve never met one of those before.”

“Dobby is a house-elf. You have in fact met that particular house elf before. You are responsible for him being free from slavery.”

“Do they all look like that? All, you know, ill?”

“Dobby is dying. Healthy house-elves are generally more robust-looking, although they are frequently abused and carry marks of that abuse.”

“The abuse finally mounted up too much for Dobby, then?”

“No. Dobby is dying because he is avoiding the abuse. Elves need a home in order to live. Wizards in general exploit that need to make slaves of them. Dobby won his freedom as a result of your actions. You tricked his former master into casting him out of his home. You hid a sock inside an item that was then given to Dobby. An elf that is given clothes by the homeowner is cast out of that home. Most elves fear to become homeless in this way, but Dobby took it as freedom. He is grateful to you for that, and is determined to die a free elf. While I am not an expert, it seems likely that he has no more than a year, possibly two, to live.”

Harry could  _ entirely _ understand where Dobby was coming from. The Dursleys had used their orphaned poor relation as a child slave. The social services report into his home life had been about three quarters of why he wasn’t stuck in a young offenders’ institution for kicking Piers Polkiss into a three-day coma. Richard and Terri had done a  _ lot _ to make him understand that the Dursleys were completely abnormal, but fifteen years of that treatment left  _ marks _ . If someone tried to send him back to it? Harry would cheerfully  _ kill. _

Harry had, however, found a better place to live and, eventually, a home. “He can’t find a homeowner who won’t enslave him? There must be someone like that?”

“If the war had not intervened, I would perhaps have hit on that as a solution in place of the naive measures I began advocating in the cause of house-elf welfare when I was fifteen. Dobby might have trusted me or you, perhaps, but his objection would have been that he could not know and therefore trust whoever might have inherited the home from you.”

The fact that Dobby had turned mercenary for the good guys was something Harry could cheer him on with, in that context. “Me getting him free is why I get mates’ rates, then?”

“It seems likely.”

“How much danger have you sent him into?” That question was important. Harry would wear a single freebie off the little bloke, he could respect the gratitude even if he couldn’t remember the reason. If he was fighting, though, Harry was going to insist he got paid in future.

“Virtually none. Unless special measures are taken, which they seldom are, Elves are only seen when they want to be. Their magic is similarly only detectable when they wish it to be, absent special measures. He will be able to go close enough to the enemy that he could touch them, and they would not know he was there. Elves are commonly underestimated by wizards. They adopt servile mannerisms so as not to be expelled from their homes, which leads wizards to assume they are weak.”

Harry hadn’t had more than the basics of conduct-after-capture training. He wasn’t in a capture-prone trade, so it wasn’t a priority for him or the Army. He  _ had _ read ahead, though. Keep your head down, don’t attract attention, hide any clue that you were planning escape or resistance. They were all in the books. Harry had felt, reading that stuff, that he was already a natural at it, and from the sounds elves were just as born to it. If the elves were doing it deliberately, the wizards were in for a  _ nasty  _ shock if the elves ever finally decided they’d had enough. 

Which prompted another question. “Can Dobby  _ fight? _ If he’s that stealthy, he can deliver bombs and things?” Harry knew how to make bombs. Had just taken  _ several _ courses in EOD, in fact, and one of the DSes had made a joke about how, in order to fight the dark arts, first you must know the dark arts. Making explosives out of common household chemicals was an exaggeration, but not  _ much _ of one.

“Dobby can, but I have decided not to ask that of Dobby. Many of the locations he would be required to operate in are guarded by elves of their own, elves that are stronger than Dobby because they have homes and he does not. His value as a reconnaissance and surveillance specialist is too great to lose in combat. Further, if it became known that we were using elf fighters, the enemy would either retaliate against all elves or begin taking the special measures against elf magic I referred to. The first would be morally unacceptable absent compelling strategic need, the second would again deprive Dobby of his value.”

“Them retaliating against elves wouldn’t provoke an uprising?” Harry couldn’t fathom that. Everyone had their breaking point. The moment where they just saw red, decided ‘fuck it’, and kicked off.

“Elves would in all likelihood submit to the retaliation, even if it was genocidal in nature. Dobby is highly unusual in accepting his death as the price of freedom.”

Dobby, Harry decided, was  _ hard as fucking nails _ . “So finding a home he’d trust is  _ really _ a non-starter?”

“Dobby correctly points out that homeowners are mortal and their heirs are not always good people. His last owner was descended by only two generations from people who treated their resident elves as the helpful friends that they are by natural inclination. Even if that problem could be addressed, by becoming bound to a particular home his actions would be constrained to the defence of that place. He wishes to contribute to the war for as long as he can.”

Harry winced. There was courage, which was one thing, and there was not giving a fuck any more to the extent Dobby clearly did. Which was quite another.

The little bloke’s lack of a home, and the effect it was having on him, preyed on Harry’s mind. Harry had managed perfectly well for the first fifteen years of his life with no home of his own. He’d never considered Privet Drive a real home. It was nothing like the homes in the books in school, with a family in them who cared about each other. He’d not understood at the time - had only understood when it was slowly and carefully pointed out to him by a counsellor - that the Dursleys weren’t a family. Families were built on love, not genetics. Whatever had made the Dursleys get like that - Harry didn’t know and cared less - they hated themselves first and foremost. Uncle Vernon was gorging and drinking his way to an early grave, Dudley had an  _ appalling _ record at his primary school and the posh boarding school he was sent to, and Petunia had made herself widely  _ loathed _ by people who were polite to her face. 

Nobody came right out and said it to Harry, he had to work it out for himself: it was all stuff they’d brought on themselves. They could have had vastly better lives by just being slightly better people. Could have been a family. Could have made their house a  _ home _ . Harry couldn’t remember when he first decided that Privet Drive wasn’t a home, just a house he happened to live in, but it was pretty early on. About when he started going to Stonewall and got away from Dudley’s bullying. Although that was probably a lot of fictional memories to cover up his time at magic school. Vernon and Petunia seemed weirdly absent from that time even though he could ‘remember’ living with them. Without the influence of the stuff that Jane - as he really ought to think of her, or sooner or later he was going to call her Nude Magic Cyborg Woman to her face - had taken off him last night, he could tell there was something very wrong with those memories.

Even getting moved away to live with Richard and Terri, who were serial fosterers on the stand-by lists of several fostering agencies, didn’t really give Harry something that felt like home. That had to wait until he’d got settled in in the Army. The Corps in general and his Regiment in particular,  _ those  _ were his first home. It was something the Army had been doing since the year dot. A collection of regiments, each of which was its own little community of fighting men. The newer ones, like the constituent regiments of the RLC, worked hard to establish that sense of continuity and tradition. Of being, for the lads like Harry, a  _ home _ . Often, again like Harry, the first real one they’d ever had.

Harry spent the next couple of hours in nervous silence with Jane, whose lack of emotion gave her inhuman patience. Harry used the time to use the hotel room’s tea-making facilities and spin his internal hamster wheel on the subject of how fucked he was, how fucked Dobby was, how fucked Jane was, how fucked the whole  _ world _ was if mad magical time-travelling was the best solution, and even if they did the time travel, all the likes of Dobby could do was choose between slavery or a slow death.

His musings were interrupted by Dobby appearing again. More of what Jane had likened to Star Trek transportation last night.  _ Apparating _ , his messed-up memory supplied. Probably another thing he’d never do again, if he’d ever done it in the first place. 

“Report please, Dobby.”

Harry could tell it wasn’t going to be good news. Dobby had looked hang-dog before. This time he looked  _ beaten _ . 

“Mister Harry Potter Sir’s muggles are murdered by three bad wizards and one bad witch, sir. Also their little doggy. Does Miss Jane or Mister Harry Potter wish to know what cruelties were done before they all died?” Dobby didn’t look like he wanted to report any more.

Harry was shaking his head, but Jane was her usual dry, cool self. “Is any of it likely to prove important later?” she asked.

“Dobby does not believe so, Ma’am. There is one bad wizard and one bad witch lying in wait there. They is saying they will wait one week for Mr. Harry Potter.”

Harry knew, somehow, that Dobby would never lie to him. That everything he’d said was the truth and nothing but, and the only reason he wasn’t getting the whole truth was because Dobby didn’t want to share the horror. He was lightheaded and numb just thinking about it. Cold down his spine. Black robes bursting into the homes of people who had no idea they existed. Casually killing. Killing the dog. Killing a  _ child? Had they? _ And then to squat amid the carnage to set an ambush - “With the bodies still in the house? And how many?” 

“They put the bodies, three poor dead muggles and one poor little doggy in the icebox in the storeroom with the big outside door.” Harry took that to mean the adjoining garage. Where there  _ was _ a big chest freezer, although as vegetarians they hardly ever had it full. What they had in it now? Harry didn’t feel angry. You couldn’t use a word like ‘angry’ for a feeling this  _ cold _ . There was, of course, an obvious response.

“Dobby,” Harry asked, “would delivering something to that house be something they could catch you doing?” He was keeping his feelings on a tight rein, ensuring they didn’t show on the outside at all.

“No sir,” Dobby said.

Harry turned to Jane, “If we can get some chemicals - mostly cleaning stuff, though I’ll want to stop by a garden centre and a builders’ merchant for some of it - I can probably ensure them two murdering fuckers die in their sleep, no magic to be detected at all. Take a day or two to set up, like.” 

“What kind of action are you proposing?”

“Nothing inappropriate for someone that just murdered a twelve-year-old little girl.” Harry had only ever spoken to her on the phone, but she’d come out of her shell a lot over the year she’d spent in that house. Bad enough that they murdered Richard and Terri, who were good people for all they were a pair of complete wet nellies. Little Charlotte? Herry could feel something uncoiling in him, something deadly, vicious and  _ vengeful.  _ “I’m thinking nailbombs under their beds and incendiaries to follow. Does fire destroy the evidence on the magical side, too?”

“It does,” Jane said.

“Dobby will help. Dobby does not want paying for this job either. Mister Harry Potter will tell Dobby what is needed, and Dobby will get it.”

Harry grinned at Dobby. Dobby  _ understood _ . Neither he nor Harry could fight these fuckers head on, not and expect to survive. There were alternatives, though. Asymmetric warfare, they called it. Harry had seen it up close and personal, and more than a few times worried that at some point the other side were going to start  _ training _ their people. Between Dobby’s capabilities and Harry’s know-how, they could make quite the useful little guerilla army.

Something about that, about Dobby joining the Army, was nagging at Harry’s thoughts. 

He decided to put it aside for the moment. “Most of the places we need to go for this stuff will be shutting soon.” He checked his watch, it was just a bit before five. “Won’t open until ten or eleven tomorrow. Lot to buy, too. Have to replace all the kit I had stashed in my barracks room. Some of it was manuals and textbooks, worse luck. They’d be  _ useful _ .”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Mister Harry Potter Sir, but when Miss Jane said she was going to get you, Dobby followed along and learned where you was living by listening most carefully. Dobby anticipated your order by going to your rooms and packing your things. All of the things from Didcot army place, and all the things from the Abingdon army place, and all the things from the muggle vault in Abingdon. Dobby put them in the muggle carriage when you stopped at Hilton Park.”

“How did they all fit?” It was the least of Harry’s questions, but the only one he could get out. He mostly lived out of bags and a bergen, had been doing while posted to Didcot. He had some stuff at the barracks at Abingdon, and a small self-storage lockup which had to be what Dobby was calling ‘muggle vaults’. How had he found it all? How had he fit what  _ had _ to be a couple of cubic metres of accumulated stuff into the boot of a Rover 400? How had he done all that  _ without Harry noticing _ ?

“Dobby shrinks things by magic, Mister Harry Potter Sir. Did Dobby do wrong?” The little bloke looked mortified by the mere  _ possibility. _

“You did very  _ right, Dobby _ . I’m just surprised.” He looked at Jane. “And this is a  _ weak _ elf?” The amount of capability that went into doing what he’d done was  _ staggering _ . He’d condensed at  _ least _ a dozen man-hours of travel, packing and loading into less than two. Probably more than a dozen, since he’d had to  _ find out _ where everything was first. From the sounds, he could even have done it faster if he hadn’t been waiting for the car to stop.  _ Literal _ magic logistics: Harry was pretty sure everyone in the RLC from the Colonel on down would cheerfully trade some quite important body parts to have that kind of help on the strength.

Jane remembered to nod this time. “Yes. Dobby is free of restriction as to his location, unlike other elves, but as to raw magical power he is considerably in decline.”

“I’m going to guess that you don’t have any actual trained  _ soldiers _ in this Order of yours, yes?”

“We have some Aurors, who are the magical equivalent, when they are not discharging police functions. They would not be soldiers as you understand the term, however.”

“Well, if Dobby can contribute on the scale he clearly can, there’s no fuckin’ reason you should be losing. Logistics power war, and Dobby can do the work of at least a dozen men  _ and can’t be detected doing it _ ? It’s not just the other side that overlooks elves, I reckon.”

“You may be right. I have no military training, and what I have learned of magical warfare has come from others who are likewise untrained. The Aurors are primarily police.”

“And policing isn’t soldiering, just as soldiers make pretty poor police. Look, we’ve got a test case here. I’m pretty sure I’ll just get killed if I show up on Monday morning, or if I’d tried to go back for my stuff. Dobby just solved that problem without needing to be asked. What that tells me about his capabilities is that he can put things in places that nobody else can reach. Dobby, you can’t  _ fight _ other elves, can you sneak past them?”

Dobby nodded.

Harry grinned. “Logistics and stealthy reconnaissance, all in one soldier. Any regiment’d be glad to have you, if the army wasn’t a humans-only … deal …” An idea had struck. He’d dropped history after GCSE - wanted his maths and science A-levels, probably those compulsions at work - but there was plenty of opportunity to take an interest. There were also the Sharpe books: the TV series was good, but the books had loads of interesting history and notes at the end to fill in the gaps. An idea from  _ there _ combined with his own thoughts about his real  _ home _ ...

_ Step one _ , Harry thought,  _ find out if it’s even possible. They keep saying ‘home’, need to find out what  _ exactly _ they mean by that _ . “Dobby, does an elf’s home have to be a place? Like, an actual house that people live in? Or can it be an institution?”

“Dobby is not sure what Mister Harry Potter sir is meaning?”

Jane had that answer. “Elves can claim institutions as homes. When Hogwarts school was closed and replaced with the Slytherin Academy last year, many of the elves left. The institution they called home was no more, even though the building was unchanged and being used for the same purpose. Enemy propaganda was that the elves were treacherous. Those that applied to the Ministry’s House Elf Relocation Office were killed. I do not know if there were any survivors.”

“Dobby does not know either. Some may have found magical places in the wild to call home, as the elves of old did. Most will have given up, and gone to dust. Some will have become … other. Elves with no home and no purposes, elves who fear to die, we become something we do not speak of. It is … bad. Wizards kill them when they find them, and they are right to. Dobby has purpose, and does not fear to die, so he is still Dobby. Dobby will be Dobby, and a free elf, until he goes to dust.”

Leaving the questions about what Dobby was risking becoming to one side, Harry tried to find words to give shape to his so-far fairly formless thoughts. “Dobby, my home is the Regiment. Was the Regiment, I suppose, I’m going to have to go on the run. But it isn’t a place, it’s a shared tradition and history and purpose. Where the HQ is doesn’t matter, changes whenever the Army tells us to move somewhere else. Could something like that be your home?” The idea was taking more and more shape in Harry’s head.

Dobby tilted his head, his eyes narrowed in thought. “Dobby would … try? For Mister Harry Potter Sir?”

Jane put in, “Are you allowed to recruit for the Army? Even if you are, the International Statute of Secrecy is still binding on everyone in Britain, so Dobby would not be allowed to join.”

“I’m not, and that won’t be a problem. What I’m thinking of doing is bringing back the old tradition of raising private regiments, it was never abolished. There’s a bloke up in Scotland that keeps a company or so of ceremonial troops. So how about I found Harry Potter’s House Elf Logistics and Reconnaissance Regiment? Only one recruit, so far, and pay’s going to be a bit nominal until we can start looting from the enemy. The Statute of Secrecy don’t matter because I’m still technically a wizard, right?” Emptying his bank account was going to be an early priority. He had a tidy little pile of savings, not being one to piss every week’s pay up the wall. That’d do to get started. After that? Since the enemy seemed to be a few years behind the times -  _ slaves! In this day and age! _ \- Harry felt that the right thing to do was go back in time with them, to the days when looting from the enemy was how you funded a war.

Dobby looked like his head was going to implode with confusion.

Jane’s only contribution was, “I cannot think of any legal objection to this plan. Dobby’s concerns about enslavement should be addressed.”

“Dobby,” Harry said, “how do you feel about being the first recruit to this new Regiment? You can help set the traditions and be a part of its founding history. All elves will be paid on a scale to be determined. First regimental standing order will be that elves shall have discharge as of right if they give one calendar month’s notice. Means the elves of the regiment are slightly freer than the human soldiers, if we ever get any, they have to give twelve months’ notice. We’re adopting whatever bits of Queen’s Regulations are relevant for everything else, I’m not going to the trouble of writing a whole lot of new regs when I went to the trouble of learning one set.” Harry had managed to get so bored he’d read all three-hundred-and-something pages. More than once, too. If there was one thing military life had in plenty it was long stretches of hurry-up-and-wait. 

Jane was looking baffled, the nearest Harry had seen to an emotion on her face since meeting her. “I am unable to predict the likely consequences of this.”

Harry shrugged. “Dobby’s dying because he doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t want a normal home because they’ll enslave him and even if they don’t it’ll limit his ability to fight as a soldier. This is a way of giving him a home that goes wherever he is and by regulation will give him his freedom after a term of service, or on demand if he gives proper notice. Up to him whether he re-enlists after that. The clothes thing fits, too, they used to issue demob suits when you left the service. Whether we go with your time travel plan or not, he needs this or something like it. If it don’t work, he spends a month doing what he’d be doing  _ anyway _ and we disband the Regiment without getting any more recruits.”

“Dobby wants to read the Queen’s Regulations,” the little bloke said, “And Dobby agrees that elves should be paid.”

“There’s a copy in among my stuff,” Harry said. “As for pay, I’m thinking the old-fashioned three sevens. Seven pounds, seven shillings and seven pence per year on top of issue of rations and uniform, and a share in whatever loot we take from the enemy. In modern money that’s Seven pounds, uh, forty-two pence.”

“The magical community uses Galleons, Sickles and Knuts. Seven of each of which at the treaty exchange rate with the goblins is,” she paused to calculate, “Thirty six pounds and 96 pence, rounded up. Which still fails to comply with the muggle National Minimum Wage Act and is below what any worker in the magical world is paid.”

Harry was about to point out that the armed forces were specifically excluded from the minimum wage laws, when Dobby spoke up. “Miss Jane, ma’am, the amount is not mattering. If Dobby is paid for his service and may leave at a time of Dobby’s own choosing, Dobby  _ is a free elf _ .” He snapped his fingers and Harry’s kitbags and boxes and the tea-chests he’d used at the self-storage place all appeared between Harry’s bed and the wall of the hotel room. “Mister Harry Potter sir, which book is the Queen’s Regulations?”

It was all packed as if Harry had done it himself, so finding his books, non-fiction, army and training, was the work of a minute. He pulled it out and handed it over. “A lot of it’s going to be irrelevant, so we’re going to have to exercise some common sense. But the point of the Regiment is organisation, and organisation means rules and regulations. We’re copying these to suit our purpose, not making ourselves subject to all of them.”

Dobby popped away with the book in his hand, and reappeared on the desk, cross-legged and intent on the text. Harry noted that he appeared to be a quick reader.

“What is your plan?” Jane asked.

Harry took a moment to think.  _ Keep it simple, stupid. _ “Improve Dobby’s health and effectiveness. If there are other elves in the same condition, improve  _ their  _ health and effectiveness. Conduct warlike operations against the enemy, as advised by you. What  _ is _ the best thing we can do right now to strike back against the enemy?”

“Continue with the time travel plan.” She sounded  _ sure _ of that.

“Explain?” 

“It will save the largest number of lives from enemy depredations, and potentially prevent the war before it begins. Albus Dumbledore drew up a plan for me to use as sole time-traveller. I have improved it. The time travel ritual will now take multiple passengers in parallel, conveying my magical knowledge and your increased maturity back in time. Also, your knowledge of warfare appears to be greater than I had assumed. It may prove helpful in a magical context. Dumbledore’s plan eschewed direct action against the enemy, seeking a magical resolution centred on undoing the power of the enemy leader. While magically potent, his plan did not address the social and economic causes of the civil war that the enemy waged. Removal of their leader would not prevent the war. Dumbledore was emotionally compromised in such a way that he could not countenance the measures necessary to remove obstacles to reform and social change.”

“Revolution?”

“Not in the conventional sense, but it is an apt word nonetheless.”

Harry shrugged. He was fine with the idea of revolution. His politics came back to his old standby: The Opposite Of Whatever Vernon Dursley Thought. Vernon was a fat, racist, old-school-tie Tory. Harry, therefore, had taken the time and trouble to educate himself on the  _ other _ end of the political spectrum, and was inclined to believe they had a point. 

As to the revolution part, Harry was under oath to protect and defend the Queen and her Heirs. Everyone from there on down was fair game as far as he was concerned, and there were times - especially when contemplating the disappointment of each succeeding shower of bastards in Parliament - that he thought what his country needed was a short, sharp shock of good old-fashioned Red Terror, just to remind the Rupert classes that it wasn’t  _ all  _ privilege. He could get into that with Jane later, once they started preparing to go back. Speaking of which, “I’m guessing time travel takes a bit more than some wand waving and magic words?”

“Correct, for the version we are going to use. The magic requires a full ritual performed to culminate on one of a small number of suitable spots at the precise local moment of winter solstice, which next occurs at Twelve Forty Two on twenty-first December.”

“When you say ‘ritual’ what do you mean? It gives me images of dancing about in the bollocky buff with weird fluids and chanting.”

“There will be no dancing.”

Harry snorted. Yeah, there was a sense of humour in there. He admired the resolve it took to crack jokes when you couldn’t laugh at them yourself. “Nudity and weird fluids, though, yeah?”

“The fluid components of the magical working will seem strange to you as you do not remember taking potions classes at Hogwarts. We will almost certainly not be able to obtain the appropriate ritual clothing, so nudity will, as last night, be necessary. There will be some acts of preparation of whichever site we choose, the first of which requires to be done at summer solstice. Some ingredients and components remain to be secured. One item will require to be stolen from the Ministry as close to the target date as possible. It is only available from there and its nature will be a clue as to what we intend.”

“So it’s the last thing we secure and it’s a mad dash to the ritual site ahead of pursuers who think we might be about to undo all their lord and master’s hard work toward world domination?”

“Correct.”

“So anything we can do between now and then to bugger up their ability to pursue us, we should do?”

“That would logically follow.”

“So we should recruit as many elves as we can find between now and then. Can elves help with magic like this?”

“I do not know. With Dobby’s help, I may be able to calculate a solution. The arithmancy is laborious.”

“Arithmancy?”

“The mathematics of predictive numerology. Complex predictions require many stages of calculation. The work occasionally requires calculations to be repeated hundreds of times with slightly different variables.”

Harry decided he’d get into that later. The spreadsheet bit of the ECDL course might come in handy. “We should get dinner. You might be okay with refuelling on muesli, but my morale is going to take a hit if I don’t get some decent scran down me. What’s the nearest town? There’s bound to be somewhere open for takeaway, and I need to start on emptying my bank account before anyone thinks of putting a trace on it.”

“Either Chorley, if the service station access gates are open, or Preston if they are not. Will the banks not be closed?”

“There should be money in the cash machines. You’ve been out of the muggle world a  _ long _ time, haven’t you?”

“Correct. Banking is done by machines now?”

“For basic cash in and out services, yeah. I’ve got a daily withdrawal limit and I’m going to have to ring them up and shift all my savings into my current account, so it’s going to take a few days to get it all. Means I can drive about a bit, lay false trails by getting cash out in different towns.”

“That would seem tactically astute. I will think about possible refinements of this plan. When selecting food for me, be advised that I follow a vegetarian and low fat diet.”

Harry grinned. “You look well on it, I will say that.” It had been quite obvious to him that she didn’t miss PT often, if at all. “Dobby, what shall I get for you to eat?”

“Dobby will have a bit of whatever Miss Jane and Mister Harry are having. Elves do not need much food.”

_ Extra rice, then _ ,  _ and maybe some bhajis to go with, _ Harry thought, and got dressed to go out.

It took nearly two hours to find a takeaway place that looked decent, place an order and get back. A piece of that was getting the local A-to-Zs from the motorway services so’s he could plot out his route.

It gave him time to think. Asymmetric warfare wasn’t something he’d particularly studied, as such, but it’d come up a time or two in regular orientations from the ruperts. The big strength it had was that it allowed one side’s fighters to down tools and go back to being ‘innocent civilians’ again. “Swim like a fish in the sea of the people” was a quote Harry had heard. From Chairman Mao, who’d won a guerilla war so probably knew what he was talking about. In this context, the mass of non-magical folk, muggles as Jane called them, were something he could use as camouflage. 

It was hard enough for the police to find someone who genuinely didn’t want to be found, and they were native to the non-magical world and experts to boot. Wizards who thought they’d be tainted by association if they learned anything? They wouldn’t stand a chance.

They were unable to find Jane, who was ten years out of date on her own admission, and probably longer because before that she’d been a kid and kids don’t know much. She could  _ sort of  _ muggle, well enough to pass. Harry suspected that as an adult with some army training and a few years of life experience? He could muggle harder, longer and deeper than Jane could dream of doing.

He grinned ruefully to himself. Harder, longer and deeper, indeed. Jane’s casual nudity was getting to him. He’d have to have a crafty wank later, ease springs a bit. While he didn’t get the bit about finding her creepy - unusual, certainly - he wasn’t going to try anything. She might have  _ said _ she didn’t care one way or the other about sex, but she’d come out with it too promptly for it to be something she was  _ completely _ neutral on. It was part of what had clued him in that the curse hadn’t  _ entirely _ removed her emotions.

Back in the room, Dobby was still reading and Jane had a notepad on which she was pencilling line after line of calculations. Using up time that was otherwise blank on an idea she’d just been given. Taking the initiative  _ would _ be difficult if you’d been robbed of the feelings that spark it, so clearly she fell back on training. Harry knew all about  _ that _ phenomenon.

Dinner was quiet and subdued. Harry had got plenty for everyone, and ended up eating most of it himself, relishing the ‘foreign muck’ that Vernon would have hated. Dobby had a small bowl, and ate while he read, and Jane selected a sensible portion and carried on working while she ate.

Harry saw to the clearup when everyone was done eating, and grabbed one of Jane’s books - Spellman’s Syllabary, it was called, and it was heavy going. It assumed you knew at least two languages that Harry didn’t - although he was  _ aware _ of Anglo Saxon, his girlfriend during A-levels had been doing English Literature, and he’d borrowed her copy of Beowulf. The interesting thing was that none of it was triggering any of his memories, so clearly he’d not read this one at magic school.

He’d got through maybe half of the first chapter, and was just thinking about digging out pad and pen to make notes for things he wanted to follow up on, when Dobby spoke up. “Dobby will do it.”

“You will?”

“Dobby will be a soldier. Dobby will enlist for twenty-two years’ service in Mister Harry Potter’s Regiment of Elves.”

Harry dug in his pocket. “We still call joining up ‘taking the Queen’s Shilling’. It’s not a literal shilling any more, but I think we should go with tradition.” He handed dobby a five pence piece, the modern equivalent. Harry could  _ just _ remember seeing one and two shilling coins while they were still legal tender as five and ten pence pieces respectively. 

Dobby hopped down off the desk he had been sitting on and took the coin reverentially, with a definite air of treasuring it always. 

“Right, Dobby, did you read the bit about attestations in the Regs? And the oath?”

“Yes, Mister Harry Potter Sir, in the section on Values and Standards. Dobby solemnly, sincerely and truly declares and affirms that Dobby will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Second, her heirs and successors and that Dobby will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend her Majesty, her heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies and will observe and obey all orders of her Majesty, her heirs and successors and of the generals and officers set over Dobby.” 

Harry was astonished. As he recited the Oath of Allegiance, Dobby seemed to grow. Only a little taller, but he filled out and bulked up. His eyes grew clearer, his ears perked up and lost their weary droop, and his skin lost the corpse-pallor to come up a healthy, ruddy suntan-colour. Harry had had no intention of teaching Dobby any foot drill, but the little fella snapped to attention. Chin up, chest out,  _ perfect _ position of attention.

Jane’s voice betrayed no surprise. “Dobby’s oath was sincere. Harry, your idea was correct. The Regiment is his home, now. There would appear to be some magical value in military ceremonies, as it is affecting Dobby’s entire being.”

“Private Dobby is  _ strong _ now, Miss Jane Ma’am.” The little fella ripped off a salute that would pass  _ anyone’s _ standards, odd though it looked coming from an elf dressed entirely in socks.

Almost by reflex, Harry leapt to his feet and returned it. “At ease, Private Dobby.”

Again, Dobby got the drill movement spot on. “How are you  _ doing _ that, Dobby? They spent  _ ages _ teaching us how to drill and stand right and salute properly, you seem to be doing it naturally?”

“Elves know how to  _ serve _ . Dobby doesn’t know how, we just  _ does _ , Mister Harry Potter Sir _. _ ”

Harry connected that up with what Jane had said a moment or two ago. And there  _ was _ a sort of ritual magic to it - when it wasn’t a tedious ballache, that is - so it made sense that a magical being would sort of … soak it up. “No more of that Mister Harry Potter stuff, though,” he said, “Since I’ve formed the regiment I’m, well, we’ve not even got a full section. A  _ really _ short platoon, so my regimental rank should be Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Lieutenant Potter, Sir!” 

Harry decided that would do. “You’re going to need a uniform.  _ Not _ clothes. I’m going to donate my Number Twos and one set each of all my issued clothing to the Regiment, they’re going to remain property of the regiment. Can they be magically shrunk to fit you? You’ll have to take the badges off, like, they’re all RLC badges.”

Dobby snapped his fingers, and instantly was in an elf-size set of Number Twos, albeit barefoot. The badges were in a neat pile on Harry’s bed.

“Well done, Private Dobby,” Harry said, and then had a thought. “So as to be sure you will always outrank any other elf in the regiment, I am promoting you to Lance Corporal. This is my old lance-jack’s stripe.”

Dobby took the scrap of cloth like it was the fucking  _ Victoria Cross _ . “ _ Thank you _ , Lieutenant, Sah!” A snap of the fingers and the stripe was on his sleeve.

Harry found himself returning  _ another _ salute. “We’ll have to sort out a badge and a Regimental Colour as opportunity allows. For the time being, fall out, Lance Corporal Dobby, we’ve got some planning to do.”

He  _ did _ think, briefly, of asking Jane to be Colonel Commandant to their new regiment, but realised that only he would find it funny, and Jane needed not to be distracted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> Assuming I hadn’t telegraphed it well enough in the first two chapters, it should be pretty obvious who Magic Cyborg Woman is by now. Yes, “Jean” was the middle name that made it into the books, but JKR had given it out as Jane before DH, where it first appears. By then, however, she’d given Umbridge the middle name of Jane and so backtracked in service to the unrealistic (and insulting to the reader’s intelligence) trope of all characters having unique names, the so-called “One Steve Limit.” I am exercising the privilege of fanfiction and correcting this error.
> 
> ECDL is a common computer literacy qualification that most schools offer. “Sixth Form” is the old name for the two years at the end of school, what Hogwarts calls sixth and seventh year. It’s when you do your A Levels (ie muggle Newts, and as the proud possessor of four of them - the standard number - I can confirm they are in fact Nastily Exhausting.)
> 
> Deed Poll is the popular name for a Deed of Change of Name (Deed Poll actually means a Deed that isn’t between two or more parties, like a contract or a transfer of property. There are other uses for a Deed Poll that aren’t changes of name.) (And, strictly speaking, the change of name doesn’t have to be executed in the form of a deed if you don’t want official records updating with the new monicker.) 
> 
> What elves become: brownies, hobs, dobbies, jacks-by-the-fire and all the other folk that JKR portrayed as house elves have a much richer folklore than she bothered with. The old tales have it that if mistreated, they go bad. They become malevolent creatures known - at least around where I grew up - as boggarts and they are a lot scarier than the weaksauce potterverse version.
> 
> The Sharpe books: set in the Napoleonic Wars, they were pretty popular until the TV series starring Sean Bean sent them through the roof. Richard Sharpe of the 95th Rifles and South Essex Regiment is the only fictional character deadly and tough enough to keep Sean Bean alive through over 27 hours of screen time. It made Harry think of raising a regiment because the South Essex Regiment was raised for the personal aggrandisement of its founding Colonel, Henry Simmerson, who was a recurring villain throughout the series. The author, Bernard Cornwell, includes notes at the end of each book saying where he departed from the actual history of the battles Sharpe fights in and giving fascinating background detail.
> 
> The ‘bloke up in Scotland’ is the Duke of Atholl, who maintains the Atholl Highlanders. Mostly British Army veterans, they’re more of a tourist attraction than a fighting force. The shit would have to really hit the fan for them to trade in their ceremonial kit for the real stuff, but they could probably do it.
> 
> The name “Rupert” has class connotations in Britain. Which is why - there are competing origin stories - it’s a slang word for ‘commissioned officer’.
> 
> Motorway service stations aren’t supposed to be exits or entrances to the motorway system. Unofficially, they often are. 
> 
> A-to-Z is a brand of street atlases that cover most of the UK’s built-up areas, and in the days before pervasive satnav and google maps were a godsend for finding your way about.
> 
> Beowulf: the Seamus Heaney translation was a staple at A-level when I was going through. I’m sort of assuming that it was still being taught and tested on a decade and a half later when Harry (and his then-girlfriend) was going through.
> 
> I have, of course, taken some absolutely diabolical liberties with the Army Acts, the Queen’s Regulations, and military history. In my defence, House Elves are not mentioned for good or ill in any of these sources - I checked! - so I’ve got some wriggle room, I reckon.
> 
> Fanfic Recommendation: The Black Family’s PR Nightmare, by elphabalives17 on FFN. I was hooked on this one mid-way through the first chapter, and it is by turns heartwarming and hilarious.


	4. A Bloody Good Start

DISCLAIMER: JK Rowling senses fanfiction. The data could be called “pain”.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

_“Well done, Private Dobby,” Harry said, and then had a thought. “So as to be sure you will always outrank any other elf in the regiment, I am promoting you to Lance-Corporal. This is my old lance-jack’s stripe.”_

_Dobby took the scrap of cloth like it was the fucking Victoria Cross. “Thank you, Lieutenant, Sah!” A snap of the fingers and the stripe was on his sleeve._

_Harry found himself returning another salute. “We’ll have to sort out a badge and a Regimental Colour as opportunity allows. For the time being, fall out, Lance-Corporal Dobby, we’ve got some planning to do.”_

**Just Outside Abingdon, Oxfordshire, 10th June 2004**

“Just on the other side of this wall, Lance-Corporal,” Harry murmured once he was sure that the two squaddies had definitely finished their smoke-break. Dobby’s teleporting made noise, so it was important not to have anyone nearby to hear it. In movies, guards would hear an unusual noise and say ‘Oh, probably nothing’. In real life, they _didn’t_. 

Or weren’t supposed to, at any rate, but there were some right jack bastards knocking about who’d shrug and ignore anything short of Godzilla pitching up.

The invisibility cloak Jane had given him was a lot of help, although he hadn’t yet had a chance to test it against IR or, more importantly, thermal imaging kit. Lance-Corporal Dobby was just flat-out undetectable. If he couldn’t feel the little fella’s hand in his, he’d not know he was there at all.

The point of tonight’s - this morning’s really, it was well into the small hours - excursion was to get a few bits and pieces that definitely couldn’t be bought in civvy shops, as well as the means to revenge himself on Richard and Terri’s murderers without a lot of dangerous messing about with homemade explosives. While what he was doing was _hilariously_ illegal, Harry had reassured himself that he was fulfilling his oath in a larger sense by helping save the world. Which necessarily included the Queen, and never mind pesky little details like what the theft, firearms and explosives laws might say about it. 

The good part was that if military stores started vanishing as if by magic, it’d get back to whatever government department looked out for such things, possibly alerting them to a serious problem with the wizards in their midst. Jane had described the whole Statute of Secrecy apparatus, which the baddies were still maintaining so as not to have international wizard authorities descend on them. Harry felt sure that they were probably missing at least _some_ of the incidents: between that and the fact that they’d been driving out muggleborns and squibs for decades, there was almost certainly a quiet little office in Whitehall somewhere keeping as much track as they could and drawing up plans. HM Government being what it was, they probably had a quiet little office somewhere for _everything_.

This was the only part of their four-day resource-acquisition spree that required actual theft. Or, as Harry liked to think of it, ‘unorthodox requisitioning’. He was alive to the possibility that after nearly nine years of mind-control, suddenly having full control of his own brain had sent him a bit loopy. It would _probably_ explain why he kept having to stifle giggles.

Not just while they were indulging in a bit of magical burglary of HM Armed Forces, either. He’d been a bit happy-daft for days, while they were out and about shopping for civvy supplies and kit and honing up Jane’s grasp of hiding among the muggles.

Harry had found out that he had been dead on the money about having a better grasp of the non-magical world than Jane. While she _did_ have her paperwork in order for the car she’d bought, it was _in her real name_. 

Seeing that name had made Harry _feel_ things he couldn’t remember the reasons for. Good things, and a sense of gladness that he’d gone with his gut to trust her. Fortunately he’d known not to say the name out loud, but he’d told her that was going to have to change, and right quick.

It took a very quick bit of ritual magic work with a slate, a candle and some odd-looking feathers to delete the ‘Hermione’ from all the paperwork and replace it with ‘Margaret’, her mother’s name. Apparently it also magically changed the master record at the DVLA and insurance company. She’d assured him that she could do similar things to any document that wasn’t magically protected against alteration. When she’d turned out to have a big box full of gold coins - kruggerrands and the special ones wizards used - along with an eye-watering stack of used twenties, Harry realised that with that amount of money and Jane’s magical forgery skills, he could make the pair of them _vanish._ The world was full of records and databases. If you could dodge _those_ \- and the people who could make that happen dealt in cash, and lots of it, so what magic couldn’t fix bribery _would_ \- you were home free provided you didn’t attract attention or parade in front of a sensitive location’s CCTV.

That was for the future, though. Two days of high-intensity shopping with various different disguise magics - making them look older, changing their colouring, making them taller or shorter - had filled some of the remaining space in Jane’s bigger-on-the-inside boxes. Harry wasn’t too amazed at _those_ , he’d gone through a fair amount of Doctor Who in his time, the novels and audio dramas were _ideal_ for the Army’s long periods of hurry-up-and-wait. That one of the boxes had a complete lab inside it - set up for magic potions, but it looked like it’d be just _fine_ for chemistry - was the real find there.

It’d been midway through the first day when he realised that it’d take only one mind-controlled copper in each police area to track them down by Jane’s reg number, so he’d copied down the plate of every blue Rover 400 he saw with the idea of Jane doing the same trick on the car’s plates as she had on the paperwork. She’d gone one better: she now had a stack of replacement number plates in her bigger-on-the-inside handbag, conjured out of thin air. Harry bought a screwdriver, and they could change plates and appearances every time they found a concealed spot to park. Without, and this was important, using Jane’s wand outside the hotel room and its security spells. Potions and enchanted items were not tracked, apparently.

He’d picked up a lot of little details like that. Jane, Harry suspected, would reason out a procedure that would work and then use it repeatedly, not changing it unless it went wrong. She agreed that trying to figure out what a competent enemy would do and thwart _that_ in advance was a good idea, but stated, flatly, that she no longer had the required empathy. Harry reckoned he’d have to fill that gap. He wasn’t up to snuff on enemy capabilities - yet! - but denying them the things they could do if they thought to use mind-controlled muggles was a pretty obvious move.

Harry’s musing had made him almost miss Dobby popping them to the other side of the wall. It was the fourth store-room they’d visited that night and one of the ones with an IR camera inside. They’d have to be quick: while the invisibility cloak would _probably_ hide them from IR - it was woven from the fur of a magical creature that used the capability to hide from predators, some of which could see body heat - _probably_ wasn’t the same as _certainly_. He was wearing a balaclava, just to be on the safe side.

And, to make doubly sure - there was _supposed_ to be someone watching the feed from this camera, but in practise nobody paid any attention unless one of the other alarms went off - Dobby was tasked with sticking blu-tack over the lens as soon as they got in. A suddenly-failing camera was a lot less urgent than ‘someone in the ammo stores’. Still something that someone would be along to check on in a couple of minutes, so they’d have to get a wiggle on.

Jane had suggested giving Dobby a shopping list for this bit and turning him loose, which sounded like a good idea. Until it turned out that while Dobby’s elfish instincts got him knowledge of foot drill that’d make any drill pig weep tears of manly joy, he didn’t get any knowledge of the technical side of soldiering. It’d be a poor show if they had to keep sending him back because he’d got the wrong thing. Plus, he’d not recognise useful kit that happened to be stored right next to the stuff Harry had put on the shopping list, and they’d miss it forever. A good ‘gizzit’ expedition had to have an element of ‘if it’s not nailed down we’re having it’, after all. They’d already picked up a few bits on exactly that basis, and thank _fuck_ for bags and backpacks that were bigger on the inside and weighed exactly the same no matter how much you dumped in them.

“Ready, Lieutenant Potter, Sir,” came Dobby’s voice from thin air, “Camera covered with sticky blue.”

“Well done, Dobby. I’ll hold the bag open, and to start with we want everything off _that_ pallet.” He’d nicked a section’s worth of the rifles that were in the armoury - taking just his own would have been a dead giveaway - so having a lot of bullets made sense. He’d also half-inched a couple of sidearms, so, “Those boxes, third shelf up from the bottom, all of those.”

A couple of finger snaps from Dobby and they were done. He didn’t bother looking around for anything else: he’d actually _worked_ in here once upon a time and other than the two lots of ammo he knew there wasn’t anything else he needed. He’d got explosives, grenades, detonators, detcord and various other goodies earlier, and it wasn’t like there was any way for the army to keep him coming back again. “Time to work our way back out.”

Dobby’s teleporting - _apparating,_ as the version of him that had been to magic school insisted - tired the little man over anything but the shortest ranges if he was bringing Harry along, or a load of any great size or mass. Dobby had been entirely surprised by Harry asking questions about his capabilities, apparently expecting to be worked until he dropped and flogged for idleness when he did. 

Harry had decided that SOP for anything like this was therefore going to involve short hops, only where needed to get past obstacles. If anything went shit-shaped, Harry wanted Dobby to have plenty in the tank to deal with it. He told Dobby to treat that principle as a standing order unless told otherwise.

Outside the storeroom, feeling horribly naked in the floodlights - the invisibility was something he _knew_ , not something he _felt_ \- Harry looked around for wandering squaddies. None in sight, as expected for quarter to four in the morning. There was going to be a _lot_ of activity when all of the stores he’d twocced were noticed, which ought to be first thing in the morning for most of it. He was going to be several counties away in a car with altered plates by then. A car that was, some time in the next week or so, going to _literally_ vanish and be replaced with something just as anonymous, purchased in a fake name.

Harry took a brisk walk to the perimeter fence, avoiding grass as far as possible - easy enough, the runways from the days when it had been an RAF station were still there and occasionally used - and a Dobby hop out through the fence into the fields behind. From there it was a bit under two kilometres to where Jane was parked and waiting. It was a walk he could make over the fields and out of sight so’s he could take the invisibility cloak off. The thing made him uneasy, for some reason, like it wasn’t making him _really_ invisible.

He had only just got the cloak off, was about to fold it up to go in his bag, when he felt Dobby take his hand again and give him the urgent tug that signalled he had something to say. He took a knee and cocked an ear.

“Bad wizards come, Lieutenant Potter, sir. Wizard magic on the grass here warns them of footfall. Lance-Corporal Dobby heard the magic.”

“Bugger,” he muttered, and swung the cloak back over his shoulders. “Cover my trail, there’s shadow under that bit of hedgerow over there. We’ll hide and see who comes to investigate.”

A magical tripwire here along the back of the base - where they could wand-wave to their hearts’ content without being spotted - made sense if they were expecting him to sneak back in. It was sheer luck that they’d gone _in_ over the front perimeter via someone’s back garden - where a tripwire-spell-casting wizard would have been noticed - largely because Harry knew it was a difficult spot to maintain security on. If he hadn’t known about that blind spot that was also poorly-lit, he probably _would_ have gone in over the back fence. 

Getting over to the spot he’d picked, which turned out to have waist-high weeds to crouch in along with the deep shadow, he composed himself to wait.

And wait.

Five minutes passed. If they were a quick reaction force, they weren’t living up to the name. Harry had just resolved to wait five minutes more so as not to be caught moving - Dobby could erase the trail with a finger-snap, but couldn’t hide where he was standing at the time - when a rippling set of cracks announced the arrival of four black-robed figures. At seventy-eighty metres, Harry couldn’t make out much for all it was a clear starlit sky with a bright half moon, but they looked like they were wearing metal masks. They glinted in the moonlight.

“ _Death Eaters_ ,” Dobby whispered in his ear. The enemy’s elite fighters and leaders, according to Jane.

Harry didn’t think much of them as fighters. Even his bare-bones combat training had him better squared away than this lot. They were standing tall, no effort at concealment, and their black robes were camo only for deep shadow. Harry, for his part, was quite confident of them not being able to see him, so he could afford to stick around a little bit. “Get close and listen in on what they’re saying, Lance-Corporal,” he whispered, “Report back when you know their intentions.”

Dobby popped quietly away, the noise lost in the rustling of the breeze through the hedgerow behind him and the distant sounds of traffic. Once he was gone, Harry reached into the expanded bag. “My rifle,” he whispered, feeling the familiar shape smack into his hand. The bag had a spell on it that sorted and retrieved the contents if you asked for them. Jane assured him it wasn’t detectable outside the bag.

After he’d got the weapon out, praying that it was somewhere near zeroed still, he whispered “magazine” and “box of rifle rounds”. Keeping his eyes on the four figures, who were just sort of hanging about and not even covering all of the possible approaches - they were looking through a gap in the hedge into the airfield, at the barracks beyond - he loaded the magazine with twenty rounds, dumped the rest of the box back in the bag, and very slowly and carefully put the magazine in the rifle. He _just_ stopped himself charging the rifle the way he’d drilled: if there was a knack to doing that quietly, he didn’t know it.

Through the 4-power sight, he got a better view of the masks. Stylised skulls. These people clearly hadn’t bothered to keep up with the conventions of modern cinematic storytelling: they were plainly the baddies. 

The body language and the distant, indistinct sound of voices let him know they were conversing. Just stood around _chatting_ when hunting for someone they _ought_ to be assuming was dangerous. _Fuck’s sake_ , he thought to himself, _how bad do Jane’s lot have to be to be losing to the likes of these?_

He went over some possibilities and contingencies in his head. They had put themselves in a weak position, and it just made _sense_ to see how they reacted if he took a shot or two, whether they had any defence against firearms up and running, and - there was a little bit of bloodthirst involved, too - maybe hurt the enemy a bit, make them be a bit more slow and cautious next time.

Doing _anything_ against these clowns was dependent on Dobby having one critical piece of magic up his sleeve, though. If the little fella _did_ , Harry reckoned he could slot at least one of these so-called elites and not have them catch him doing it. 

Dobby popped back. “Lieutenant Potter, Sir!” he whispered, “Bad wizards is waiting for you to sneak back out. They thinks their spell told them you was going in because they have another spell on each of the gates. There are bad wizards at the gates, too.”

“Thank you, lance-corporal,” Harry murmured, kind of enjoying Dobby’s big beaming smile at having an actual _rank_ to be addressed by, “Tell me, can you magic my rifle so it makes no noise?”

“Dobby can, Lieutenant Potter Sir.” He snapped his fingers. “Done, and it will last until dawn.”

 _Have to look into something more permanent,_ Harry thought to himself, _we’ll see if Jane’s_ _got anything in all those books._ Aloud, and still _sotto voce_ , “Watch them. Tap me on the shoulder when they’re all facing away. And when I give the word, pop us to the far side of the hedge directly behind us.” _Those masks ought to bugger their peripheral vision, too, unless they’re magic. Assume they_ are _magic._

He yanked on the charging handle: just as Dobby had promised, it was completely silent. He hunched down lower and picked an aiming point in the middle of the nearest Death-Eater’s lower back. _Close, so aim low_ . The vegetation ghosted through the lens as it swayed in the breeze. He could hear the words of his instructors running through his head, and concentrated on them: this was the first time he’d fired this bloody thing anywhere that wasn’t a range, and he was _acutely_ conscious of the possibility of cocking the whole thing up.

On the positive side, while he wasn’t even the best marksman in his section, never mind the Army, a man-size target at eighty metres, tops? Whatever the faults of the L85 - and they were many, especially in the bits of the Army that the upgrade programme hadn’t got to yet - it hit what you aimed it at if you followed the drills. And Harry’s issue weapon just _worked_ . Even the most fault-prone models of _anything_ had the occasional perfect specimen.

Dobby’s tap came. Harry remembered to shoot calmly, smoothly, just like he’d been taught.

 _Hit!_ he thought with a grin, watching his target fall. And then, _fuck!_ The silencing hadn’t worked, it just _changed_ the sound of the shot. _Supersonic bullet, you numpty_ . Best to move, sharpish. “Dobby, pop us _now_ ,” he murmured.

Once on the other side of the hedge he ran, doubled-over, a three or four dozen paces to the left along the hedge. Not a moment too soon, something back where he’d just been started burning with a loud double _whumph_ . Finding a small gap in the foliage at about waist level, he trusted the invisibility cloak, took a knee, and peered through. From the looks they’d set fire to a couple of patches of the tall weeds Harry had just vacated. Neither spot was the one he’d been on, although they _had_ got uncomfortably close and the light would’ve spoiled his concealment.

“Dobby is sorry, Lieutenant Sir. Dobby does not understand why there was noise.” Dobby’s voice sounded like it was right in his ear. A magical trick, it had been disconcerting until Harry got used to it.

“My mistake, Dobby,” he murmured back, “Forgot about something, gave you the wrong order. I’ll explain later. Watch them for looking away again. Or at least not straight at us.” He was gratified to see that there were only three wizards still there. The one he’d shot wasn’t visible from where he was. “This time, as soon as I take the shot I want you to pop us a hundred yards that way.” He thumbed off further to the left. The hedge curled in there, as he recalled, so he’d be able to take a shot from the Death Eaters’ flank, if they were dim enough to hang around and be shot at a third time.

While Dobby was acknowledging the order, Harry went back to watching the enemy. Having set a couple of fires, they were even _better_ illuminated than when they first appeared, the fuckwits. One of them gestured with his wand, and a ripple in the air shot out in front of him. Whatever the spell did, it wasn’t obvious to Harry. What’s more, it seemed to peter out before it got to where Harry had been hiding. Odd.

“Dobby will distract,” and then a pop.

Guessing at what was about to happen, and grinning at Dobby’s initiative, Harry took the same low-centre-mass aim on the nearest Death Eater. He watched for the turn.

Something caught their attention and they swung themselves and their wands to bear. He’d just got first pressure taken up when Dobby popped back, making him snatch the shot. _No fuckin idea where that one went,_ he thought ruefully, as Dobby grabbed hold and popped him away. He’d made the fuckers _flinch,_ though.

Dobby had taken a literal, geometric approach to Harry’s order, so there was a short dash back to the hedge, and a few seconds’ hunting about for a gap in the foliage. He ended up prone, peering between the thick stems of the hawthorns. He was further away, now - a quick bit of geometry in his head suggested somewhere between 140 and 160 metres, still ‘aim low’ range - but the idiots had lit more fires. They were, at least, crouched down a bit, wands extended and off-hands raised behind them like fencers.

They’d turned side on to where Harry had been shooting from, to make a smaller target, and in the firelight he could see a shimmer between each man and the threat they were addressing with their wands. Force-fields, like the one Jane had - _Shield Charm_ , insisted the shade of the old Harry - but done with the wand rather than shims of carved dragon-bone inserted under the skin.

The great part about them getting into duelling poses like that, of course, was that they’d turned their biggest profile to where Harry now was. He had no idea whether those shields went all the way around, but it was worth finding out. “Stand by for our next movement, Dobby. On my command, I want us in the near-left corner of the next field _that_ way.” He stabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

Through the scope, Harry got the sense that the Death Eaters were having some kind of argument. The one he’d shot was definitely gone - teleported away for medical attention, probably - so he took aim at the middle one, putting the pointer right where his arse-crack would be. He was about to start with the trigger when the nearest of them - just visible in Harry’s scope - pulled his arms in, and in a weird, eye-twisting swirl, vanished.

Teleported ( _Apparated!_ ) away for reinforcements, Harry reckoned. Which meant a few minutes getting them together, briefing them, and teleporting back. And, if they had any sense, teleporting all over this little collection of fields looking for the sniper. Harry realised he needed to get a briefing off Jane about the limitations of that little trick: if the enemy grew a brain, or at least made an effort to get away from their current amateurish performance, they could have used it to make his life very difficult if he didn’t want to reveal Dobby’s contribution to the war effort.

For now, though, there were two targets remaining. As he took up first pressure, Harry wondered if he could get ‘em both, so the reinforcements came back to a couple of corpses and their quarry long gone.

 _Hit!_ His target flared with blue, staticky shimmer. It seemed that the shields went all the way around after all. Getting shot at still scared the crap out of them, though, they both hunched down small and their shields got more visible. Little dome-like things. Wondering if they were like video-game shields and got weaker the more you hit them, Harry put five rounds into the same target one after the other.

He couldn’t _see_ any reduction in the blue shimmer, and decided he’d pushed his luck more than he ought for one night. Making them turtle up under their shields would have to do. “Dobby? Now.”

The hedges in the spot where Dobby had brought them to were a little lower than elsewhere - more recently flailed from the looks - so Harry had a reasonably clear view back to where he’d been. No signs of movement. He could no longer see the enemy, not even the blue shine of their shields. They’d probably be unclenching over the course of the next minute or so, and their reinforcements would be arriving slightly after that. 

The fires they’d set were burning down, too. If those had been noticed, or Harry’s shooting had been heard, someone would be along to see what was going on, probably the MOD Police but possibly the redcaps. The military police version, not the ones that must’ve been at Harry’s school, or he’d learnt about them there. Knowing facts without remembering learning them was strange. Having those facts fight with information he’d picked up since was downright _disconcerting._

What happened if either lot turned up, Harry didn’t know. The bad guys _should_ immediately break contact, since they were still trying to maintain magical secrecy. If they didn’t, there’d be a problem. Fortunately, it was a problem that actually _helped_ . If the government - the real one, not the Ministry of Magic - sat up and took notice of their wizard problem, the rest of the magical world would descend on Britain to stop this collection of maniacs from blowing the whole gaff. The _important_ thing about the problem, though, was that it wasn’t Harry’s to deal with.

“Dobby, message for Jane, please. Have been in contact with the enemy after leaving the barracks, one probable kill. I have broken contact and am proceeding on foot to rendezvous. Got that?”

Dobby nodded and popped away. Shrugging his invisibility cloak around himself and making sure it covered the rifle in particular, Harry set off at a brisk walk along the edge of the field, parallel to the road on the other side of the hedge. There was a gate a couple of hundred yards further along that he could climb over, and pick up the pace a bit along the road.

He kept his head on a swivel: unless he was perfectly still, the cloak tended to flap about a bit allowing occasional glimpses of his feet. If he spotted any pursuit or searchers, his best bet was going to be to halt and crouch. The cloak didn’t actually give him much more concealment than an intelligent use of shadow and camouflage did. Like the advert said, though, every little helped.

He’d got out of the field and covered the best part of half a kilometre, by a rough count that didn’t account for a lot of stopping, turning, and walking backward to check the back trail, before he heard anything. A distant fusillade of cracks - it was a quiet night, and the sound _carried_ \- told him that there was a mass of wizards arriving. He checked his watch. Nearly twenty minutes. _Pathetic._

The fact that it wasn’t followed by the sound of a siren and gunfire told Harry that nobody had noticed anything at the barracks and decided to come take a look, with ensuing shouting, mayhem and gunfire. Which was one problem down. The remaining - important! - one was getting out of the enemy’s likely search area. Dobby had popped back after getting the message to Jane, and was snapping his fingers every so often to erase what little trail Harry was leaving. The occasional bootprint on the grass verge, maybe, but Dobby liked to be _thorough_.

The next fifteen minutes were nerve-wracking, as Harry had to take it slow to remain invisible. He could pass for a muggle out for a night-time stroll, but these fuckers _killed_ muggles when they felt like a laugh, and arse-o-clock in the morning on a quiet country lane was prime getting-away-with-it territory. So that meant moving slowly enough that the cloak kept him covered, and watching every possible angle as he went. 

Every so often, he’d hear a crack as a Death Eater displaced air by telep - _apparating_ . It was always behind, and never close, and he always halted, crouched, and froze. Once, he froze when he heard the sound of clothing flapping, and goggled when he saw a pair of robed figures flying on actual _broomsticks_ . Maybe twenty, thirty metres up, just sort of drifting along in the night, scanning the ground beneath them. The sight made him ache for reasons he couldn’t put into words. _Probably more suppressed memories_ , he thought. He kept on the tarmac after that: he didn’t want to risk freezing on the verge and having flattened grass give him away.

Ahead, he could see the lights of a small village, which represented safety in his mind. Time to pass for a muggle and be in with a chance of safety, he felt. He vaulted over a field-gate and nipped behind the hedge to swap balaclava, camo and invisibility cloak for a parka and a baseball cap.

-oOo-

Driving away with a small arsenal in the boot of the Rover, Harry felt happy with how the night had gone. He’d be happier if he knew whether the Death Eater he shot was permanently gone or not, but that was a small thing. He knew more about what his weapons could do to wizards - suppression and moral effect, if they were expecting fire, and a chance at a kill if not - and had some ideas about using Dobby for fire-and-movement drills. A subject on which, granted, he’d not done much more than read the manuals after getting out of basic training. Still, even the bare-minimum he got as part of the army’s tail meant, as far as he could tell, he was a better soldier six pints to the good than the Death Eaters were stone-cold sober. Which was also good to know.

“Why did you open fire on the enemy? I ask because I understood you planned to avoid contact.” Jane’s tone wasn’t querulous or confrontational. If there was an upside to her condition, it was the complete lack of agenda behind anything she said. If she told you something, it was because she assessed your knowing as having value. If she asked something, it was because she wanted to know the answer.

“They never saw me. With Dobby present to telep- _apparate_ me out of trouble, I wanted to see how they reacted to incoming fire.” _And slot at least one of the bastards_ , but that went without saying. “A single shooter, at night, with good cover, is hard enough to detect if you know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t have expected them to know, based on your descriptions, and their performance when they arrived wasn’t exactly scintillating either.”

“Dobby informed me they were Death Eaters. They are highly-trained wizards. For them to perform poorly is unexpected.”

Harry shrugged as he merged them on to the A420. “Dobby overheard that they were expecting me, they’d cast an alarm spell to catch me sneaking over the back fence. They think I’m basically just a muggle, yes? So they didn’t come expecting a fight. Thought they’d turn up, capture a defenceless muggle, and fuck off home for tea and medals.”

“That would explain it.” 

Harry had noticed that there was some doubt that he could have given them the benefit of. ”Dobby, was the alarm spell specific to me?”

“It was, Lieutenant sir.”

Harry scoffed. “So they _hadn’t_ had five days of false alarms from random dog-walkers and they were _still_ that slack? Yeah, that’s the main thing we’ve learned tonight. We’ve got a window of opportunity to do a lot of damage before they get their drills squared away and start shaping like they fuckin’ mean it.”

“What else did you learn?” Jane asked.

Harry began rattling off the points he’d already assembled - a couple of kilometres slow walking with frequent halts gave a man time to think while the adrenaline was wearing off - and as he went on added points he was deducing as he went along. And, without needing any prompts, things he felt he could have done better. He had never contributed much to after-action reviews, but he’d had to be present for a couple and knew how it went.

When he’d finished, Jane observed, “The problem with the sound of bullets is a difficult one. If one wishes a thing to be charmed silent, the charm has to be on the thing. Rune-charms etched into the bullets might be possible, but it would be laborious. Is subsonic ammunition available for your weapons?”

“For the pistols, yes, but I don’t know where it’s kept. As for the rifles, no idea. No idea if it’s even possible for a gas-operated weapon, there’s kind of a minimum pressure to make the thing work. I certainly never saw any, but it’d be specialist stuff.” Something about what Jane had said nagged at him, but he couldn’t quite seem to grasp the thought.

 _Whatever it is, it’ll come_ , he decided. There was another thing he’d had thoughts about, so he changed the subject. “That teleporting, sorry, _apparating_ , that they did. Is that something I used to be able to do?”

“No, it is not taught until the age of sixteen, with licenses not awarded until seventeen.”

“So I could still learn it? I get that I can’t re-learn stuff they wiped out of my head, but can I learn new things?” Harry was trying desperately to keep his hopes firmly down. There was a phrase he’d read in a book: _hope in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first_.

Long silence. Apparently it was a question that required a lot of thought. “As to apparation, it seems unlikely. The basic technique requires a wand. The use of a wand is taught early, and all subsequent wand-work as far as I know builds on the basic technique of magical expression through a wand. Having lost that basic technique, it probably follows that the beginners’ lessons in apparition are impossible for you. There are advanced techniques for apparating without a wand, but I do not know how they might be taught to someone who cannot perform the basic technique.”

Harry’s hopes weren’t going to die without a fight. “You say probably and as far as you know. How much room for doubt is there?”

Less of a pause this time. “I do not know. By the time I took apparition lessons, magical expression was below the level of conscious thought for me. It may be that some form of expression was required that was different to that required to perform transfigurations or charms. It is certainly the case that I found wandless apparition simple when I came to try it.”

“So if I got a wand, there’d be a chance?” Harry made a mental note to loot the next wizard he killed, although he’d not had much of a chance to do so in either of the encounters he’d had so far.

“I do not know how large a chance. Practise will also be difficult to arrange, as we will require a large space which I can secure against Ministry scrying.”

“How large a space?”

“The first lesson is apparating over a distance of five feet. Progressively larger steps are taken until the student can reliably apparate over fifty feet before proceeding to outdoor lessons. If a space can be acquired, I know how to reverse splinching.”

“We’ve got cash, and there are plenty of places you can rent a lock-up or similar. What’s _splinching_?” The unfamiliar word wasn’t ringing any bells.

“Accidentally leaving behind a part of yourself while apparating. I understand it is painful.”

“I can imagine,” Harry replied, carefully _not_ imagining. “What’re the limits on apparating, anyway? Can you just go anywhere, is there a range, what?”

That prompted a long lecture, which Harry absorbed as he drove. Between four and five in the morning, even Spaghetti Junction was quiet enough to get through on more-or-less autopilot. 

Apparition was, as far as anyone could tell, instantaneous. It had a range that was theoretically unlimited but in practise was dependent on how strong the wizard or witch was. Clarity of focus was key to both strength of magic and the more strenuous levels of apparation: Jane had noticed that her ability to apparate had improved considerably once her emotions were suppressed.

You had to be able to visualise the place you were going to, follow a magical signal of some sort, or follow someone else’s apparition. You couldn’t just follow directions to a place you’d never been before: you needed to go by normal means or follow a pathfinder. Otherwise it was the floo or portkeys, words that rang a bell with Harry for all he couldn’t remember what they _were_.

It was the etiquette around teleporting from place to place that amused Harry.

“Do you mean to say that the only reason those guys back in Didcot came in through the door like they did was _good manners?_ ” Good manners that had got one of them _killed_ . Harry still couldn’t believe his luck: if they’d been even _slightly_ clever about it, he’d be dead.

“That would be … not inaccurate. I am aware that the results were ridiculous in that particular case, but there are good reasons for it to be that way. While it is possible to magically protect places from incoming apparition, it is difficult and expensive to do so, and causes inconvenience to the residents who might want to apparate in and out. Therefore, wizards and witches are strongly socialised to respect private spaces so that they remain private.”

“And they keep that up in the middle of a civil war?”

“They do.”

Harry chuckled quietly to himself and dropped the subject, concentrating on keeping it between the lines and dead on the speed limit. The apparation thing was hilarious, though. It’d be like politely knocking on doors you needed to get through in the middle of battle. Mouse-holing into and through defended buildings so as to come from an unexpected angle had been in the Army’s bag of tricks since at least the second world war: Harry had helped make up the charges for the engineers who did it against insurgents in Iraq. One of them had mentioned that it went all the way back to fighting against Irish rebels in 1916.

In a war where neither side thought to drop peacetime standards and habits of thought, the side that first took that step of understanding that things were different in battle would have a big advantage. From things Jane had said, there wasn’t much room to turn this war around even if it was possible at all. Getting back to before the other side started fighting, as she maintained was the only way to do it, would make the impact of _actually starting to fight_ all the greater.

Harry was still undecided on the time-travel thing. Not on whether it was possible, he’d been sure of that as soon as he’d been told. Jane had explained that that was almost certainly because he’d done the limited, legal version. It wasn’t because he was worried about some kind of dragging-the-war-back-into-the-past thing either. Once you travelled back, your original timeline was _gone_. They couldn’t send some Death Eater Kyle Reese after you to shag your mum and mess everything up altogether.

He wasn’t even that bothered by the whole destroying-the-existing-timeline thing. When you got right down to it, that was completely abstract: for everyone that suddenly wasn’t born any more, there were a whole lot who were alive again. Everything in balance, sort of thing. What’s more, there was every reason to believe that time resets happened all the time: the universe was a big place and earth was unlikely to be the only place where magic was done. Jane had made a telling point: wizards and witches tended to assume that Planet Earth was the centre of, and only important place in, the entire universe, and that Britain was the most important place on said planet. They were missing the possibility that the universe was big enough that this sort of thing happened on a regular basis, and the universe was taking no harm from it.

She had a whole logical justification for treating it like it was no big deal, but for Harry it boiled down to this: for all Harry knew, it had been done somewhere in the universe several times while he was alive, and it hadn’t made the slightest bit of difference to him. So, doing it again? No worries.

What _was_ holding him back was the change in the kind of problem. Right now, it was simple: he was on the run, with his own little asymmetric war to fight. He had no idea if he could achieve anything, find allies, whatever, but the problem in his lap was a known one and had a possibility of being dumped on someone higher up the food chain than a Junior NCO with four years of fake memories and the magical equivalent of a learning disability.

Once they were back in time, though, that comfort evaporated: the minute they tried to dump it in someone else’s lap there was a risk that they’d be killed for being time-travellers. Assuming that they even got _that_ much traction: the oldest they’d be would be fifteen in Jane’s case, fourteen in Harry’s. Prime age for being disregarded as over-dramatic teenagers. Earlier, and they’d be little kids making up stories for attention. With that as the _best_ they could hope for, they’d be on their own, and absolutely holding the initiative, which meant it was on them to make all the running rather than just reacting to whatever the baddies did. 

Taken together, all that was positively daunting, and reminded Harry why the staff and general officers got paid a lot better than he did.

**Charnock Richard Motorway Services, 10 June 2004**

“So, Dobby, can you repeat that back to me?”

“Lance-Corporal Dobby will first scout the locations of the bad wizards and witch. If any are awake, Lance-Corporal Dobby is to withdraw. If all are asleep, Lance-Corporal Dobby is to place the bottles of petrol one under each window, one in each doorway, and one in each corner of each room. Lance-Corporal Dobby is then to place the two big devices on the stairs and by the front door and light the fuses _here_ and _here_. Lance-Corporal Dobby will then pop to each of the sleeping bad wizards and witch and place one device under whatever they are sleeping on and light the fuses. Lance-Corporal Dobby then has five seconds from lighting of the first fuse to pop away to not less than three hundred metres and not return until ten seconds after he hears the last explosion. Lance-Corporal Dobby will not assess bomb damages from less than one hundred metres in case of secondary explosionses.”

Harry nodded and grinned. “Well done, Lance-Corporal Dobby. Off you go, and good luck and good hunting.”

Between the nailbombs under the beds, the coke bottles refilled with paraffin and petrol, two large wodges of PE4, and a jury-rigged incendiary charge, the chances of there being much left of the bastards by the time the fire brigade got everything put out were fairly slim. Forensics wouldn’t get much out of a gutted house and the known occupants were all dead in the freezer in the garage just to confuse and complicate matters.

The _important_ thing was that the bad guys wouldn’t have got away with it. 

What’s more, Harry had noticed something quite remarkably _important_ about enemy operations, and had a theory confirmed when he took those potshots at the Death Eaters earlier. The enemy _really_ weren’t used to having anyone actually _fight back_.

As Lance-Corporal Dobby popped away, Harry _grinned_. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> And here we see why I put Harry in the RLC. Nobody’s better placed to steal from the stores than the chaps who work in them.
> 
> That “quiet little office in London somewhere” pretty much has to exist, for the reasons Harry enumerates, and would have learned to keep themselves very quiet to avoid the obliviators. That they’d have a plan for war against the magicals necessarily follows, and it’d not be entirely secret either. Military planning for everything is a time-honoured tradition, even if only as a punishment or training exercise for junior officers. A useful one, as coming up with a plan for bizarre situations trains up the capability for out-of-the-box thinking. Which is why most militaries have a plan for zombie uprisings, alien invasions, and similarly unlikely eventualities.
> 
> Harry’s probably being over-paranoid about mind-controlled traffic officers. Car registrations aren’t that obvious a giveaway even nowadays with fifteen years more prevalence of ANPR. 
> 
> “Twocced” - from the theft-adjacent criminal offence of “Vehicle Taking Without Consent”, usually abbreviated to TWOC on court files, it became slang for all forms of light-fingeredness.
> 
> “Modern Cinematic Storytelling” - Astute readers will have noted that That Mitchell and Webb Sound wouldn’t be broadcasting the first radio version of “Hans, Are We The Baddies?” until 2005. Harry gets away with the anachronism because he’s the protagonist, so there.
> 
> There are probably errors all over my depiction of the shooting. I can look stuff up as well as anyone, but I’m absolutely pants with any firearm that isn’t a shotgun and basically gave the whole business up as a bad job a bit over thirty years ago. I mean, an expensive hobby that I’m congenitally crap at? You can keep it, unless I’m taking the kids/niblings out for a go at the clays. (Which I can’t do so much these days on account of the mental illness disqualifying me for a Firearms Certificate. Fortunately, I live out in the country where everyone and their mum is packing.)
> 
> The Ministry of Defence Police, ModPlod in the vernacular, are one of the UK’s three special non-territorial police forces, their job being to be in the general vicinity of defence establishments as sworn constables, which the Royal Military Police aren’t. (The other two are the Transport Police, who look after the trains, and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, who guard nuclear power stations and related infrastructure.)
> 
> Spaghetti Junction is formally known as the Gravelly Hill Interchange, or Junction 6 M6 if you’re in a hurry and just passing through. Two motorways, two-A roads and a lot of local traffic all converge in thirty acres of 5-level traffic management that has to fit around canals and railways and assorted other impediments. It’s not as bad as some other junctions - the Worsley Interchange on the M61 is positively non-euclidean in places - but if you’re going to hit traffic on the M6, that’s one of the likely spots.
> 
> Fic recommendation, some one-shots: 
> 
> Hermione’s First (Five) Acts of Accidental Magic by mishaleh, only on AO3 as far as I can tell. Adorable. 
> 
> Wandmaking, by Right What Is Wrong on FFN. Grim and horrible. 
> 
> Too Many Travellers by Inusitatus on FFN. Hilarious, and the best time-travel fic ever.
> 
> Things You Cannot Leave Behind by Yakage on FFN. Beautifully tragic.
> 
> Amor Vincit Omnia by TheFeistyRogue on AO3. In which Madam Zabini’s dead husbands are discussed.
> 
> Finally, FFN reader **rswknight** dubbed her The Herminator. Which I’ve been ruthlessly suppressing in my own mind lest I give in to temptation to have Harry call her that. He totally would, too.


	5. No Plan Survives...

DISCLAIMER JK Rowling is out there. She can’t be bargained with. She can’t be reasoned with. She doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and she absolutely will not stop until she’s ruined Harry Potter for everyone.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Next chapter might be late. Been somewhat ill lately - not Covid, flare-up of old trouble - so didn’t maintain a buffer, and re-worked my plan for the second half of the story so everything I  _ did _ have written became obsolete anyway...

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

_ “Once they were back in time, though, … they’d be on their own, and absolutely holding the initiative, which meant it was on them to make all the running rather than just reacting to whatever the baddies did.  _

_ Taken together, all that was positively daunting, and reminded Harry why the staff and general officers got paid a lot better than he did.” _

-oOo-

**Somewhere in Kielder Forest, Northumberland, 13th June 2004**

It had taken Harry long hours of scouring Ordnance Survey maps to find this spot: a remote bit of moorland a long piss from the border with Scotland. The nearest road was more than an hour’s hike away, there was no livestock, and for all it was a sunny Sunday afternoon in prime tourist season it was far enough off the beaten track that there had been no ramblers all day while he and Lance-Corporal Dobby got set up. Carefully, because this was the kind of stunt that would only work once. Maybe twice. Three times at the outside. Getting the most he could out of it was  _ important _ .

Harry regarded the hole he’d dug with some distaste. Like a lot of hilltops in this part of the world, it was covered in heather and blanket bog: soft and uneven underfoot, easy digging, and the water table was about a foot down even at the height of summer. The hole he’d dug in it was nobody’s idea of a proper fighting position, but then it didn’t have to be. The only real downside was that he was going to have to spend the next ten minutes or so in cold, peaty water.

_ No sense putting it off _ . He shrugged off his bergen and stuffed it with everything that was not going to be absolutely necessary for what he was about to do. There was a modest chance he was going to have to fight his way out or just straight-up run away, so getting shut of everything nonessential that might confuse him, weigh him down, or get in the way was crucial. Nothing but weapons, ammo, invisibility cloak, water and a bag of Haribo, on a belt-kit that Jane hadn’t had time to give the magical tardis treatment. Even if she had, Harry wasn’t about to do something this dangerous using kit he hadn’t trained with thoroughly. The disposable cameras in their sandwich bags were for if everything went perfectly. Harry would be  _ very _ happy if that happened, but wasn’t holding his breath. 

“Take that back to Miss Jane, please, Lance Corporal,” he said, once he was sure he’d got rid of everything nonessential, and took a moment to check his rifle and pistol were in good order as Dobby popped away with the Bergen.

He’d carefully rested his rifle on the side of the hole and was making sure he didn’t disturb anything as he climbed in when Dobby returned, popping into existence with a snappy salute that Harry returned despite the awkward posture he was in. “Miss Jane is waiting with the car, sah! She says she will start the engine when she hears noisy noise, sah!”

“Very good, Dobby,” Harry said, getting the rest of the way into the hole, “Now, if you’d be so good as to join me in this here hole, we can get the party started.”

Dobby did a nimble little skitter-scramble-splash into the water next to Harry. There was just enough room for the two of them. Harry lifted his helmet so he could get earplugs in and ear defenders in place, and once he had it properly on, passed his rifle to Dobby and picked up a board he’d brought along and covered in cut turf.

Holding it over his head - no mean feat, there was four inches of dirt on the thing - he checked Dobby was ready: the little fella looked  _ hilarious _ with ear defenders on. He took a deep breath and yelled at the top of his lungs, “HERMIONE GRANGER IS GOING TO KICK VOLDEMORT’S HOOP IN! VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT! HERMIONE! HERMIONE! HERMIONE!”

The last lot of bad guys who’d teleported -  _ apparated! _ \- in had taken their own sweet time about doing it. Harry didn’t see the enemy being a lot of muppets as an excuse for slack drills on his own part, though, so he smartly squatted down and lowered the board across his hole by way of overhead cover, only a small gap at one side.

There wasn’t any point honking about the way the bog-water rushed up his arse-crack. He’d grinned and bore worse on exercises. It was actually quite refreshing, if he  _ had _ to find a bright side, after a whole day of sweaty hard work in the hot sunshine. “And now we wait,” he murmured to Dobby, “Rifle and periscope, please?”

The periscope was a simple, cheap thing made of black 40mm waste pipe with mirrors held in with epoxy putty and an unglued joint that let him swivel it about. It was a clear, bright night - the sky was still mostly blue, sundown had been only a few minutes ago and this far north, this close to midsummer, all you got was a few hours of twilight, not proper night.

With that and the moon just past half-full and high in the sky, visibility wasn’t a problem. Night vision would help, and although there were plenty of places he could buy the kit he’d need to make something, he hadn’t done it yet. Getting set up with a secure base of operations under assumed names - a rented terraced house in Blackburn - and a car that had never been registered under a totally compromised name had occupied too much of their time. Dobby, for his part, had been discreetly checking on places that elves could live wild in the hope of finding recruits, without any luck so far.

“One minute, sah!” Harry had got Dobby a watch so they could get an accurate read on the enemy’s level of preparedness.

Jane had theorised that the Snatchers, who responded to Taboo violations, would have got very little business recently and so would turn out  _ en masse _ , probably with Death Eater support. That would slow them down from their early under-a-minute performance. Harry was only keeping up his scan of the moorland to be sure there weren’t any civilians wandering into danger.

“Two minutes, sah!” 

It was probably too much to hope that they’d get all of the bastards. Jane had extensive notes on things they’d done on previous call-outs, with names attached to some of them. Harry quite agreed that a messy and unpleasant end was nothing less than they deserved, and giving at least one shift of the bastards a good shoeing would make life easier going forward. Nothing else, forcing them to take more care would slow them down.

“Three minutes, sah!”

The moorland was ideal for Harry’s purpose. The stretch of ground he’d chosen was nearly flat with no cover. The heather was a bit more than ankle-high, over soft ground. Camouflaging his set up required only the effort to push things down into the vegetation. Digging a hole deep enough to curl up in with his head below ground level - and the spoil around it by way of extra cover - was easy work. So long as he’d got the set-up right - and he’d had  _ hours _ to fuss over it - his chances looked good. The only thing the enemy could do was to arrive with their shields already up, and Jane had assured him that that wasn’t possible. Something technical to do with how apparition worked.

“Four minutes, sah!”

Harry rolled his eyes when he heard that. If he’d been a genuine Anti-Voldemort Freedom Fighter, able to apparate away, they’d have missed him entirely. Being charitable, maybe they were watching for that and not wasting their time if he just apparated out. More likely, right now someone had just had to spend four minutes steaming through the Snatchers’ ready room, kicking arses and shouting to get them awake and on their feet.

The minutes ticked by with not even any wildlife showing up - Harry began to suspect that some of what was going on involved dragging supposedly on-duty wizards out of the pub - and it was in the middle of Dobby’s call of “Fifteen minutes, sah!” that a rattle of arriving apparitions - possibly portkeys, but they sounded the same - made Harry startle in his spider-hole. 

A fast three-sixty with his periscope confirmed that something like three dozen enemy had arrived. All within his prepared circle, which was good, and including three Death Eaters. Which,  _ fuckin’ score! _

_ Drop _ the periscope,  _ hunch _ down,  _ Grab _ the clacker,  _ squeeze. _

A fraction of a second to wonder if it had actually worked - and -

The world turned into nothing but noise as he screwed his eyes shut. Hearing protection was all very well, but when twelve claymore mines, six PE4-driven nailbombs, and a frankly ludicrous amount of detcord went off all at once, you heard it in your  _ testicles _ . He felt bits of soil rattle onto his helmet, and the gust as his overhead protection blew away.  _ Oops _ .

He rose enough to bring his rifle up to the aim and over the edge of the hole. Dobby was doing  _ his _ bit and watching to Harry’s rear as he swivelled to where the main mass of enemy were mostly on the ground. Five were still on their feet, in an obvious bad way. They probably couldn’t hear the gunfire when Harry shot them, three rounds each to centre mass. They might be tough enough or stupid enough to still be standing after taking multiple hits from high-velocity steel balls, but their eardrums wouldn’t be healed up by anything short of actual magic.

Scrambling out of the hole, Harry got that weird sense of unreality, of everything but him being in slow motion, as he put a couple of rounds into everyone who looked like they might still be alive and at least one into even the obvious no-hopers. Who were the majority: Harry had done his homework when designing his ambush. He’d got all three of the Death Eaters with the mines: the (temporary) survivors had been the bigger Snatchers. None of the corpses was female, so he’d not got Lestrange. Hadn’t been expecting to, she was probably important enough not to get stuck with going out on shouts like this.

None of the faces he photographed, once he was sure they were all dead, rang any bells. 

Doubtless Jane could identify them.

He’d wondered whether he should be searching the bodies for useful kit and intel, but Jane had vetoed that. Anything taken from the corpses could be scryed for, especially if it had blood on it anywhere. 

Harry had taken care not to get any on himself, and would be doing a  _ thorough _ clean-up before getting in the car. 

Especially his boots: there was claret and bits of bad guy everywhere, dripping off the heather and making the going even  _ worse _ underfoot.

They’d parked close to a stream for that exact purpose.

“All fragments cleared up, kit recovered, hole filled, Sah!” Dobby reported. 

That was the final stage in the plan: removing clues. 

The wizards that came to investigate when this lot didn’t report in wouldn’t understand what they were seeing, but if they put the mind-whammy -  _ Imperius curse _ or similar - on pretty much any muggle with military experience or even a decent memory for war movies it’d be quite clear what had gone on, so clearing up the forensics was needful.

Harry returned Dobby’s salute. “You got enough puff left to get us back to the car, Dobby?”

“Sah!”

“Good lad. Let’s go, Lance Corporal.”

Somehow it was the act of teleporting with Dobby that was the cue for the shakes to start. Thank  _ fuck _ for Jane’s skill with potions: the Draught Of Peace was just what the doctor ordered.

**Fiendsdale Head, Forest of Bowland, 16th June 2004**

They looked like any other couple of hikers stopping for a bite to eat: even mid-week there were plenty out and about on this particular trail. Harry wasn’t even the only one with binoculars, although he was the only one not scanning for Curlews. Which one slightly over-friendly chap had told them about at considerable length on the hike up to this vantage point.

“I can see the ring of concrete posts you mentioned,” Harry said, once he’d got the bins focussed with his elbows steadied on his knees. The spot he was looking at was a small fenced-off patch of recently-planted trees. What was inside them wasn’t  _ quite _ blocked off from outside view, but the trees weren’t far off that level of growth.

“Good,” Jane answered. Binoculars didn’t work with her magic eyes. On the other hand, if she wanted to look at something a long way away, she just had to  _ peer _ . “If you can see it, the low ditch-and-bank around that is the important thing.”

“This used to be a stone circle, then? Like Stonehenge?”

“No. The inner circle was wooden posts, which the concrete stumps mark the location of. It is theorised that the wood was of the magical quality now used for wands. It is, however, the location and the surrounding earthwork we need. The function of wooden circles like that is no longer known, if it ever had one. Likewise for the stone circles such as Stonehenge. The important part for our purposes is the encircling ditch-and-bank structure. With appropriate magical artefacts ritually buried at the centre, the henge becomes a usable magical focus, with the helpful side effect of allowing us to draw on the entire magic of the surrounding land.”

“Is this something I would’ve learned about at magic school?” It wasn’t ringing any bells, but then the effect wasn’t consistent - some things he was assured he’d learned just didn’t register at all. Jane had suggested that some of that was because Harry hadn’t been a particularly diligent student, which sounded about right. His memories of being a problem student at Stonewall High might have been fake, but the difficulty he’d had to overcome to make up the missing learning was very real. But for the support he’d got - a  _ lot _ of tuition in good study habits and techniques for learning - he’d have stood no chance.

“No,” Jane replied, “as a form of magic they have been largely obsolete for nearly two thousand years, and without lawful purpose since the Statute of Secrecy.”

“Without  _ lawful _ purpose?”  _ That _ sounded interesting.

“Due to the International Statute of Secrecy. Magic performed this way tends to be spectacular. Magic that requires the full power of geomantic ritual would almost certainly be impossible to conceal by any practical method. Any smaller working, using less magic than the minimum the henge can channel, would result in side effects that are nearly as difficult to hide. The excess magic finds a way out, to put it in simple terms.”

Harry couldn’t  _ possibly _ leave that alone. “Like?”

“Spontaneous generation of magical lifeforms or cryptids, rains of meat, squid, blood or fish, massive plagues of pest animals from as mundane as locusts to as esoteric as wrackspurts, star jellies, spontaneous human combustions, exploding animals, geoglyphs and crop circles. To name only the most common examples from the literature.”

It sounded to Harry like a lot of the stuff in Scamander’s  _ Fantastic Beasts _ could be explained as backwash from neolithic sorcery that had been large enough to form a breeding population. With magic going stealthy in the seventeenth century it  _ would _ be the sort of thing they’d clamp down on. “So if we weren’t going to vanish up the arsehole of time we’d be in dead lumber for doing this, then?” 

“We would.” And, after a pause, “Once we are back in time I may publish a monograph on time magic. I will be using that phrase. It actually describes our likely trajectory in chronometric space very well.”

Harry turned away from staring through the binoculars to look at her, but one of the side benefits of the Curse Of The Stone Heart was a perfect deadpan poker face. There was no way to tell if she was joking or not.

Deciding he wasn’t going to reward that behaviour, he got out the sketchpad he’d brought with a tracing of the OS 1:10,000 for the area. The fact that the bad guys could apparate around the place made the little he knew about planning this sort of thing sort of useless, but he’d rather not be doing nothing. Jane hadn’t objected to an advance recce either. 

It looked more than a little difficult to control approach and access to the site. The circle itself was in a 50-metre or so square patch of fenced-off woodland on a promontory of the fell it stood at the foot of. So, not under direct observation except from the side of the fell, which was to the good. The problem was that the ground around it within a half-kilometre circle on the remaining three sides was the worst of both worlds: mostly open fields, but between all the dry-stone walls and undulating ground with patches of dead ground and random stands of woodland, there was cover and concealment galore.

To cap it off, there were people living within that half-kilometre circle. One farm within it, two dead on the edge, and the church and school just outside. Not a big problem when they came back at midnight on the 20th - there was a small chance of wiccans or pagans on that date at any site like this, but everyone else would be asleep - but the winter solstice was around lunchtime on a tuesday. Farmers would be out in the fields, the school would be full of kids. As for the church, there was only a modest chance of christian worshippers, wedding or funeral, maybe, to go with the pagans. 

For the time being, he marked the obvious problem areas on the map, checking carefully through the binoculars. As he was sketching, he mused aloud. “I finished Spellman’s Syllabary. And Ancient Runes Made Easy. I’m working my way through Hieroglyphs and Logograms. You say I never studied Runes at magic school?”

“You did not.”

“So there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write runes to make magic happen, right?”

“There is not. They are a different form of magical expression from wand-use. They are not useful in a tactical context, however.”

“Unless I, say, carve the runes of silence that Runes Made Easy gives as an example on a bullet, and also on my rifle.”

She nodded. “That ought in theory to give you one silent shot.”

“That rune-spell is eight runes, and so long as I get through the copper jacket and into the lead I don’t need to paint them, right?” There was a whole lot of stuff on how carving methods, and the presence, absence and type of paint in the carving affected the magic. The principles were easy enough to apply, and a rune carved through copper into lead would work just fine for the fraction of a second a bullet took to reach a target.

“Carving each individual bullet would be laborious.”

“I’m a soldier: I’m not afraid of laborious, repetitive, boring jobs. Look, each bullet would take about five minutes to do, with the right vice-and-magnifying-glass setup. That’s twelve bullets an hour, but let’s say ten so I can take regular breaks. Eighty bullets a day, which means a full basic load in two-and-a-bit days, three if I take it easy, and after that it’s whatever I can make in odd spare moments. If you can do the space-expanding thing on my belt-kit, I can even carry two rifles and only use the one loaded with silent ammo if I have to and just shoot the regular stuff most of the time. So far I’ve needed maybe a dozen silent rounds out of nearly a hundred I’ve fired.”

“That sounds more practical than I was assuming.”

Harry shrugged. “A lot of people underestimate the amount you can get done with pure manual labour. The trick is finding the man hours to get the job done before you need it, and, well, that’s just logistics. And assuming my magical capabilities are just crippled and not gone altogether, I should get as much use as I can out of what I’ve got left. And if we can figure out a rune-spell that’ll put a bullet through a shield charm, we’ll  _ really _ be in business.” It shouldn’t be too hard for Jane to magic up a water tank to shoot into to test things. She’d already expanded the spare bedroom in their house to the point it could be used as an indoor range.

Jane had nodded along to all of that. He’d told her that most of the ‘creepy’ people complained about was her not doing the usual social signals for listening to others. The lack of practice still made her look odd, but it was an improvement. Made her stand out less, like she was autistic or something rather than otherworldly. She took a moment to think about her reply, and then, “I shall begin teaching you the practical parts that are not in the books tonight, and I will try and find something that can be adapted as a shield-breaker. We shall make further progress when not on active operations.”

“Starting with recce-ing the museum, yeah?” Harry had most of the notes he needed on his sketch map, and was giving the bottom of the valley one last sweep of the binoculars.

“Yes. Tomorrow we will visit in the guise of ordinary tourists, or at least as near to such as a place like Preston ever gets. I want to photograph the artefacts we will be taking so I can leave transfigured replicas, and check for magical defences.”

“Is that likely?”

“I do not know. Before the coup, the Department of Mysteries of the Ministry of Magic saw to the security of artefacts such as these when they were in muggle museums. This particular henge is obscure and small, so it was probably not a priority. However, that department was notable in recruiting for intelligence rather than nepotism, so it may be that one of them thought ahead and secured all of the henge artefacts without regard to their apparent unimportance.”

That was more than a bit mind-boggling. They were talking about something that sounded about as dangerous as the working parts of a nuclear weapon - worse, nukes didn’t rewrite reality - and they  _ didn’t _ have the thing buried in secure storage somewhere with armed guards? If there’d been an outbreak of common sense when the baddies took over, they were screwed. “There isn’t a smaller, more obscure circle that we can use? One that still has its works installed?”

“No. All of the smaller or comparable henges are either too small to serve our purpose or their empowering artefacts are lost. Most of the larger ones have been specifically deactivated beyond recovery: this one was left disarmed but usable against possible future need. And to anticipate your next question, the method for making new henges is also lost. It might be possible to recreate it, but there is no guarantee that it is not a generational undertaking and the archaeological evidence suggests that it may well be.”

“That’s annoying. It would have been nice to just set up in the arse-end of nowhere and not have to worry about the enemy knowing about the site in the first place.”

“It would. There is good news, however.”

“Yeah?”

She pointed at a tiny dot wheeling over the moors, “I have spotted a Curlew.”

**Preston, Lancashire, 17th June 2004**

“Well, if nothing else, we know where to come for good tea and scones,” Harry grumbled. Jane had insisted on conducting the reconnaissance as though they were actually tourists visiting a museum, so he’d had to feign interest in case after case of small and tedious artefacts. The display of fashion on the top floor - Preston was an old weaving town - left him particularly cold. The stone age stuff had been pretty cool, though. Fortunately, most of the building was taken up with the two libraries and the art gallery it also contained, which limited the damage somewhat.

“I would not know,” Jane said, and Harry  _ almost _ detected a hint of sarcasm, “food is food to me.” He’d said something similar about the display of ancient roman glassware. Once you’d seen one first-century bottle, you’d seen them all.

He shrugged. The bickering fit their cover of a couple visiting a museum: he’d picked the role of ‘boyfriend dragged around culturally enriching experience against his will.’ Some personal experience informed his portrayal of the role, although he’d generally grinned and bore it in the hopes of getting his leg over. “That pendulum is bloody distracting, mind,” he observed.

“Foucault’s Pendulum is a demonstration -”

“Yes, I read the placard. And I suppose if you’ve got a rotunda that goes four high-ceilinged floors up, you can use it for stuff like this. Trouble is, I can’t tell whether I’m supposed to be mesmerised or unsettled.”

“That rotunda will help us. The motion sensors do not extend over it.”

“I’ll buy some later, see what they do if you put blu-tack over them. Dobby can cover us if that works.”

“Good. I am reasonably sure there are no pressure sensors in any of the floors.”

“Wouldn’t be, they’re all marble. The only issue is getting inside past the burglar alarms, I reckon. Once we’re in, so long as Dobby can disable the motion sensors we only have to worry about there being a security guard. Which I reckon is unlikely, most of what’s in here isn’t the sort of stuff that anyone would want to rob. Your typical baghead can’t shift any of it for easy money down the pub, none of the art is the kind of thing you can fence for millions, there’s nothing terrorists or serious criminals would want. Although I’m personally tempted by that fossilised elk skeleton. Hell of a conversation piece, that.”

Although Harry was staring mesmerised at the pendulum, he could  _ feel _ Jane giving him a Hard Stare. Admittedly out of the face of a random woman they’d been behind in a supermarket queue: Harry was wearing the face of the husband. 

After a bit of a silence and a munch on the scone he had in his hand, Harry finished ruminating on the plan to rob the place. “We should wait until Saturday night. I’ve never been here before, but it’s a garrison town  _ and  _ a university town so it should be pretty busy around chucking-out time. The local plod will have their hands full with all the puking and brawling.”

“They are not our primary concern.”

“No, they’re not. But if the enemy can do the kind of surveillance that picks out words yelled on a remote hillside, they can do the kind of surveillance that picks up phrases about burglary in sensitive locations. I want us in and out without being noticed, especially since you think you’re going to need an hour or so to break those protections, which means not letting the ordinary folk see us and wonder what we’re up to.”

“Dobby has not reported hearing any extension of the Taboo -”

Harry shrugged. “Can you say for certain that they can’t conceal it from him? Or set something up that only detects what goes over police radios? Or set something up to hear everything uniformed police officers say?” He’d had a chat with Dobby about how he ‘heard’ magic: Dobby could characterise magic as loud or quiet, near or far, and if it was loud enough and close enough he could hear what it did and recognise who cast it if they were known to him. Harry’s takeaway from that was that a more restricted Taboo wouldn’t be so easily heard as a nationwide one.

“No, I cannot say for certain,” Jane agreed after a moment, “although by the same token I have no evidence that they have.”

“We should assume that they’re going to figure out that they’re under-using that magic sooner or later, and be ready for it,” Harry told her, finishing up his tea. Harry had read what little Jane had on the Taboo curse, and cross-referenced it with the beginner-level magical theory books that got into altering and creating spells. He was nowhere near knowing the  _ how _ of it, but changing a spell to restrict its circumstances or effects was definitely one of the easier problems in spell-crafting, so if the enemy were going to start being clever with the Taboo, targeting it more closely ought to be possible and was a logical first step. 

“That seems sensible,” she agreed, “and when you have time, write down your thoughts on how the Taboo might be better used. Even if we cannot turn the technique against them, other parts of the Resistance might find the information helpful.”

“Will do. I’ve got that experiment with the motion sensors to do, and then we can get ready for Saturday night. And I think we can get a look at the roof of this place from that multi-story car park a couple of streets over. Want to bet there’s no burglar alarm sensors on the roof?” Harry had a clear mental picture of abseiling down into the rotunda from the skylights.

She nodded. “If that proves to be the case, it would be a good way in. If I fly slowly I can carry you across. If the night is dark enough we should escape notice despite the ineffectiveness of invisibility cloaks worn while riding a broom.” 

Harry had tried to use a broom - something he’d been good at in school, apparently - and got no more than a deep sense of sadness when holding the thing. He assumed that the ineffectiveness of invisibility cloaks was due to being able to see up them from below. “Come on then,” he said, crushing that sense of sadness as it welled up again, “we’ve got a car-park to climb and the very real problem of using binoculars from up there without looking shady as  _ fuck _ .”

**18th June 2004, Blackburn, Lancashire**

Harry looked up from the breadboard and its array of LEDs. “I think we’ve got it, Lance Corporal. That doesn’t trigger any of the sensors I bought.”

“Sah!” Lance Corporal Dobby saluted, and was clearly fighting not to smile with pride when Harry returned it: he was a  _ lot _ more susceptible to simple praise for doing his job than any of the cynical shower of toms Harry was used to. His ability to get blu-tack, which he persisted in calling ‘sticky blue,’ into place instantaneously with a click of his fingers was quick, efficient and effective, and Harry had learned to be matter-of-fact about saying as much. The elf was always in a state of excitement over being addressed as Lance Corporal, adding any more to that left Harry vaguely afraid of causing his one and only elf squaddy to explode with excitement.

“So the drill is, any sensor I point out to you with the laser pointer, you cover just like you did then, yes? And you can recognise which bit of a camera to cover if I point one out to you?” There were cameras in the museum, and lots of them. There’d be no point not tripping the alarm if their activity was recorded on video.

“Yes, to both questions, Lieutenant Potter, sah!” Another salute. Harry returned it. He hadn’t the heart to point out that Dobby was saluting  _ way _ too much: not only was the little bloke enjoying himself, Harry found it  _ adorable _ .

“And how have you got on with finding possible recruits? You said you might have something to report by today?”

“Sah! Dobby regrets to report that none of the elves at Janet’s Foss or Runswick Bay were receptive to recruitment efforts, and as the Lieutenant Harry Potter Sah emphasised that the Regiment will only take the sincerest of volunteers, Dobby said his piece and will return when the elves of those places have had time to consider the matter. Dobby went to the Isle of Man and had mixed results. It was known among elves that Man was the home of the Fenodyree, who are an elfish people, but Dobby found that there was only one left. He said he might serve.”

“Might, Dobby? Sounds like he has some conditions.”

“Yes, Lieutenant Sah! Shall I go fetch him? Dobby can translate, he refuses to speak anything but Manx. I have assured him you are not related to the Stanley family, so he is willing to meet with the Lieutenant.”

“Stanleys?” Harry was getting a definite sense that there was weirdness inbound.

“Muggle noblemen, Lieutenant Sah. They was Lords of Man in olden times and the Fenodyree hated them, sah. Some offence was given and the Fenodyree are great grudge-bearers.”

Harry could vaguely remember there being a character called Stanley in one of Shakespeare’s plays, so that fitted. As far as he knew he didn’t have any connection to the peerage, so, “You were right about me not being related to them. I’ll just have to hope I don’t do anything the same way the Stanleys did. If he takes the shilling we can ask what the problem is?”

“Possibly, sah,” Dobby said, with a definite air of disapproval. He’d somehow got a  _ very _ old fashioned idea of the subordination of private soldiers, and the idea of officers having a care about the possible sensitivities of their toms didn’t fit with that at all. Harry, however, had seen officers that did and officers that didn’t, and had formed a  _ definite _ preference. The ruperts that gave a shit were worth a  _ lot _ more of a listen, and they got the job done better into the bargain.

Not caring to get into an argument with his only troop, he said, “Well, we’ve got the rest of the evening free and Jane is busy with her calculations for Sunday night. I take it you can pop there and back without too much trouble?”

“At once, Sah!” Dobby saluted and disappeared.

Half a minute later, Dobby reappeared accompanied by what appeared at first sight to be a largish monkey. Or an Ewok on a starvation diet. Or like Yoda had fucked a goat or something. There was a human-ish face in there, behind the long, stringy brown fur, which was fortunately long enough to conceal any evidence of whether this was a girl or a boy Fenodyree. The eyes in the face were big and round, like Dobby’s, which at least  _ suggested  _ an elfish connection, and it stood a head taller than Dobby himself. It was accompanied by a decidedly  _ rural _ smell. Harry decided then and there that if one of the conditions was continued lack of personal hygiene, he was turning the grubby little bugger down flat.

Still, with the Regiment in its infancy and slim pickings for recruits, Harry decided to get his Officer face on, “Who do we have here, Lance Corporal Dobby?”

“SAH! Recruit candidate gives his name as Oshin of the Fenodyree! Last of the Fenodyree, and for all he is a dirty little article, Lieutenant Sah, he is a strong elf who will take the shilling if we will accommodate the customs of his people.”

Harry got the distinct sense from Dobby that modern values like inclusion and multiculturalism were strangers to him. For his own part, so long as he was getting a recruit out the deal, he’d take a view on whatever quirks came up so long as they didn’t get in the way of operational effectiveness. “And which customs are we talking about, Lance Corporal?” Harry braced himself, hoping for something simple like a uniform variant or dietary laws. The Army he’d served six years in was surprisingly flexible for such an inherently conservative institution. Between the Gurkhas, Scots, Sikhs, and the various religions that had their requirements, there were a lot of accommodations being made in the name of getting people into uniform. Which, falling back on his old standby of The-Opposite-Of-What-Vernon-Thought, Harry thoroughly approved of.

“Oshin will  _ not wear the uniform, _ ” Dobby hissed, clearly scandalised, “Oshin will  _ not wear clothes at all _ .”

Harry took a moment to compose his response. “Well,” he said, once he’d got the urge to burst out laughing under control, “Oshin does seem to satisfy the basics of public decency with all that hair,” in much the same way Chewbacca did, not that Harry was going to say  _ that _ out loud, “so I suppose we can ask ourselves if this will compromise operational effectiveness? Oshin, is it  _ all _ the uniform you object to, or just some parts of it?”

Oshin spoke up in a voice that was surprisingly deep for the size of him, and spoke in a language that sounded vaguely like Gaelic, which Harry had heard from a scots bloke. Harry didn’t understand a bloody word, but it sounded like a recitation of some sort.

“This is the other problem, sah. Oshin will not speak English, only Manx. He understands English, but will not speak it.”

“Stanlagh!” Oshin barked out, and then followed it up with what could  _ only _ be a stream of profanities, in which that word ‘stanlagh’ featured several times.

Dobby, unprompted, added, “He says he will not speak the tongue of the Stanleys, for all he understands it. Dobby has left out all the rude words, sah.”

That  _ could _ be a problem, and would limit where Oshin could be of use unless Harry picked up some Manx. “Do  _ you _ understand it, Lance Corporal? If so, what did he say about the uniform, before he got going on the subject of the Stanleys?” Harry made a mental note to look into the Stanleys. Having heard about some of the shit the English aristocracy had got up to he suspected he was going to find himself sympathising with Oshin at least a little bit.

“All elves is understanding each other, Lieutenant Sah! Oshin said a cap for the head is bad for the head, a coat for the back is bad for the back, and britches for the arse is a curse on the arse, sah!”

Harry took a moment to control himself after hearing that. “Well, if he can’t wear the clothes part of the uniform, can he at least wear load-carrying equipment and the badges of the regiment and any rank he earns?”

Oshin spoke again, a short sentence.

“He says he can, Lieutenant sah.”

“Then I don’t see much of a problem. I can learn a few words of Manx if Oshin will teach me, so I can understand if he needs to give me a report, and as long as he keeps himself clean and his, uh, fur combed, I think we can make the accommodation. Subject to those conditions, Oshin, will you take the shilling and the oath?”

Oshin nodded.

Holding out the shilling in one hand and the other to shake, Harry said, “Welcome to the Regiment, Private Oshin. Dobby will administer the oath and get you situated for quarters and scran. Once we’ve got tomorrow night’s mission done, we can find out what you’re capable of.”

**19th June 2004, Preston, Lancashire**

What Oshin was capable of was amazing feats of lifting and shifting, digging and ditching, making and mending and, he claimed, anything you might need on a farm or a boat. Dobby had quietly amended that last to specifically  _ not _ include herding, because the Fenodyree famously couldn’t always tell the difference between a sheep and a rabbit. That was, apparently, what the women of the Fenodyree fell out with them over, and left never to return. Harry decided that last bit was enough Elf Weirdness for the time being, and let it lie.

What Oshin was  _ really _ good for, though, was apparating much bigger loads than Dobby was able to, over much greater distances, without getting tired. What  _ that _ meant for tonight was that they wouldn’t have to fly on to the roof of the museum: Oshin could pop him and Jane over with no trouble, stand by to extract them when they were ready, and stand on stag for any interfering enemy wizards all the while.

Oshin’s new-found oath-sworn military appearance would take some getting used to, however. He’d taken to heart the order to be clean and combed and neat, going so far as to get muggle hair-care products involved. Harry’s new regiment was going to have a fairly impressive shampoo and Brylcreem bill, going forward, and Oshin had gone from looking like Chewbacca’s disreputable midget cousin to looking like an otter from the nineteen-twenties. He only needed spats and a cane to complete the look, but Harry didn’t want to open the can of worms that was the question of whether spats counted as clothes or not.

Atop the museum, they had determined that none of the skylight windows opened wide enough to let them through, but there was a door into the not-open-to-the-public balcony over the main rotunda. It was, happily, not alarmed, and Jane had a penknife that magically opened and closed locks. An inspection mirror let Harry confirm there were no motion sensors - apparently they’d assumed anyone climbing on to the roof would be spotted before they got in, or on the main staircase down to wherever they were going. That meant that the plan to abseil down from the balcony was still in play.

Magic rope took all the difficulty out of that - a whispered command would make it knot or lengthen or shorten or swing - and Dobby was quick to blind the motion sensors and cameras from where he was clinging to Harry’s webbing. It was, all things considered, much easier than Harry had been expecting, almost as easy as they made it look in films.

Two floors down and into the gallery, and Harry’s part of the job kicked in. The heavy rune-stones that marked off an area from outside magic were his job: they couldn’t be moved by magic - the elves couldn’t even  _ touch them _ \- cutting off the flow of magic being what they were fundamentally  _ for _ . Even though Jane’s magical enhancements made her ridiculously strong for a naturally-slender woman who took very little exercise, Harry had been doing daily PT and lifting and moving heavy crates for six years. She could give him a run for his money, he was still physically stronger than she was. He wasn’t quite in the built-like-a-brick-shithouse territory that some blokes got into, but he had plenty of wiry muscle and more stamina than most of the bigger lads. Besides, delegating the job of hefting the stones into place meant she could get started on the actually skilled work of breaking into the display cabinet that held the millennia-old pottery urns they’d come for.

Things on tripods that looked like surveying instruments, a big binnacle compass that had some sort of pantograph arrangement that held a small telescope mounted over it, a folding table covered in prisms and different-coloured mirrors, a lantern that gave off a soft red glow and a row of incense-burners on a tall brass stand. And, amid the array of kit that wouldn’t look out of place in a medieval alchemist’s lab, a rack of lasers that looked a bit beefier than the pound-shop laser pointer he had in his pocket.

While she was getting that set up, Dobby was magicking black sheets over the windows so that the lamps he set up wouldn’t be seen from outside. Which was unlikely, as the first windows were about where the fourth floor windows would be on any other building, but no sense taking chances.

“It will help if you hold the tape measure,” Jane said once she’d got all her tackle up and in place, “the geometry of arrangement is important.”

That gave Harry pause. He’d worked with a lot of things that had to be set up just so, and very few of them had been exactly safe to work with, “Important in that if we get it wrong it won’t work, important because it’ll give the wrong results if we’re off a bit, or important because it’ll blow up if it isn’t right?”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“Long as we’re clear,” he said, taking the end of the tape measure.

Ten minutes of measuring and re-measuring and marking of spots with electrical tape, Jane pronounced herself satisfied and turned on the lasers.

“Not what I’d expect from magic,” he observed as the red, green and blue beams meshed around the display case in a lattice of eye-twisting geometries defined by a riot of prisms and mirrors, “definitely higher tech than I thought you were up to.”

“The addition of lasers to magical metrology is a recent development,” Jane said, watching the instruments on the table carefully, “Without them there would be considerably more equipment needed, and the results would be more ambiguous. Set up the projection screen, please, just about where you are standing.”

“This is where we see the results?” he asked, unfolding what appeared to be a completely mundane portable screen.

“Most of them. The pendulum  _ here _ , the clock  _ there _ , and patterns in the smoke also contribute. To answer your next question, you did not learn this during your magical schooling. A very brief overview is given to students in a subject you did not take, three years after you were removed from school. I learned this through independent study.”

“Postgraduate magic, then?”

“Yes, but not as you would understand the term. Magical education goes no further than A-level equivalent. Further education is either vocational training delivered by employers or independent study. This would be, in your terms, degree-level magic.”

“Huh. Richard and Terri would have  _ really _ disapproved of the people who killed them.” Their disdain for anyone who didn’t get at least a bachelors’ degree if they could, ‘especially in this day and age’ because in their world student loans had never replaced student grants apparently, was pretty open. And expressed often enough that Harry had vaguely considered signing up for the Open University purely to get them to stop nagging.

Jane interrupted Harry before he could really start ruminating on the loss of the first people he could remember giving a shit about him. “We are starting to see results. Move the screen a little closer to this lens here, please.”

Once she’d signalled him to stop and asked for a few adjustments, she stepped away and composed herself to wait. Harry distracted himself with reading the plaque next to the elk skeleton again - they really _ would _ miss it, unfortunately - for the few minutes it took for Jane to be satisfied.

“I interpret this as a simple alarm and alert enchantment which sounds somewhere to the distant south, probably in the Ministry building,” she said, pointing at a pattern formed by the smoke from three of the sensors, “The runestones will only delay that signal until they are removed, so I will have to bypass it. A  _ confundus _ charm will convince the spell it has not been tripped, but there are additional spells to detect burglarious intent and they are unfortunately too stupid to fool that way. Dobby, dim the lights.”

Harry followed her finger to where she was pointing at the twisted rainbow on the screen. “What am I looking at?”

“A representation of the time and purpose of every spell cast within the bounds of this measuring apparatus. The most recent spell is a little over fifteen years ago. Since that spell was cast the art has advanced the point where there is a known vulnerability that I can exploit.”

“That’s good, right? It means the enemy aren’t thinking in terms of using this, or they’d have kept it updated?”

“Correct. Or they are at least complacent about the possibility of henge-magic.”

“Is that possible? You’ve described these things as powerful, and the enemy’s aim is world domination. Surely they can’t have overlooked -?”

“Henge-magic is also obscure. Largely unknown outside the Department of Mysteries. If the enemy purged that department, they may have lost the institutional knowledge that would point to the few significant texts on the subject.”

“Huh,” Harry spotted the obvious parallel immediately, “Jewish Physics all over again.”

“I do not understand the reference.”

“Second World War. The Nazis denounced the science that would lead to nuclear weapons as jewish physics. Drove out the jewish physicists they didn’t kill. Which is good, because it meant the Nazis never even got on the right track to have a nuclear bomb.”

Jane nodded. “The parallel is apt. It also means that preventing any suspicion of our presence here is vital.”

“Because if they learn we nicked those pots, they’ll ask why? And actually read the books on henge-magic that are presumable gathering dust on one of their shelves?”

“Correct.”

“So I should just stand back and let you get on with it, then,” Harry observed. 

“Correct,” Jane said, pulling two pairs of what looked like welders’ goggles out of her handbag, “wearing these will let you see what I am doing. If you stand by with the lock-knife and the copy urns to make the switch when I tell you, I will be able to omit several steps and finish more quickly.”

“Standing by, then,” Harry said, and stood back to observe.

Jane worked quickly and deftly, with no wasted motion in the flicking and waving of her wand. The goggles let Harry see the effect she was having on the magic, lines of ribbons of force twisted up like the discharge streams in one of those plasma-ball novelties. Jane carefully worked one particular knot apart with thin, nebulous feelers of magic from her wand, then squirted the knot with raw, formless fabric from her empty off-hand. “That one will re-form over the next half-hour,” she said.

“Looked like what we do with a pigstick,” Harry observed, “It’s a water jet that blasts a bomb apart faster than the detonator can set it off. Uses an explosive charge to drive the water into the device.”

“That is a reasonable analogy to what I just did. Unformed magic, to disrupt the spell.” She twitched her wand up once, twice, three times, then jabbed it forward. “ _ Finite incantatem, _ and that is a spell I shall have to re-cast. The tampering will only be evident if the investigation dismantles the enchantment on this case the way I have done.”

“Any other method will destroy evidence?”

“Correct.”

Preserving evidence was a definite factor in the work Harry had been hoping to get into. Whether as intelligence against an enemy or to bring a civilian criminal to trial. “This is a lot like what I was training to do,” he observed, “Just with magic rather than explosives.”

“The discipline is called curse-breaking, although it has wider applications than removing curses, as you see. The very little I know about bomb disposal suggest that there are some parallels in approach,” Janes wand was now held still, tendrils of magic holding the magic off the glass case, “you should use the unlocking knife and switch the counterfeit urn with the real one.”

When he picked up the urn, he felt a definite jolt of  _ something _ . Like it had a static charge that he’d just grounded. “Was there a curse on the urn?”

“No, the item is too strongly magical for that. You are sensing the power of the artefact, nothing more.”

“You’re sure?”

“It was among the first things I checked for. The magical signature, for want of a better term, is very distinctive. Adding additional spells would change that, and render the urns useless for their intended purpose.”

Harry shrugged and carried on. It wasn’t like he hadn’t handled things that could kill him before. It’d been his job for six years. As he got the case closed up after nestling the urns in the carrying case Jane had brought, “Do we need to do anything else?”

“Re-settle the magics on this case so they look undisturbed,  _ confund _ the alert spell so it does not think it has been tripped, clean up, and go home.”

“Dobby will clean, Miss Jane, Ma’am.”

“On Miss Jane’s word, then, Lance-Corporal. We don’t want to disturb anything until she’s good and ready. Tomorrow I want you invisible and stagged on at Bleasdale from about noon, so you’re excused all duties tomorrow morning to get rested up.”

“You should rest also,” Jane put in, “as you will be digging the hole. It cannot be done by magic, and must be put back as near undisturbed as possible. I have factored the symbolism of a warrior lowering himself to peasant work into my arithmancy.”

Harry shrugged. Clearly magic had a  _ very _ different view of the proper function of a soldier than, for example, the army’s officers did. “Can’t be any worse a job than filling sandbags.”

“We only have a narrow window. We need a hole just over a metre deep dug in less than an hour.”

“I’ll bring my recce shovel, then.” Harry touched the nearest wood he could find in the hope Jane wouldn’t ask why it was called that.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> Lots of fics have done the ‘use the Taboo to set ambushes’ thing, because it’s such a bone-obvious idea, and a trained-in-things-that-go-boom soldier would have serious advantages. I spent a lot of time finding a place for Harry to do it: it’s a rare rural spot on this island that isn’t absolutely lifting with ramblers, hikers, fell-runners, backpackers and dog-walkers. Any given Wednesday or Friday, one of ‘em’s me. 
> 
> Fiendsdale Head - SD588485 - is a lovely spot to stop for a bite to eat and enjoy the view over Bleasdale to Beacon Fell beyond. The walk up from Bleasdale is easier, but the approach up Fiendsdale itself is far more rewarding. The over-friendly chap with a thing about Curlews is somewhat displaced in time from when I met him in 2019 in the next valley over. 
> 
> The henge in Bleasdale is a real place, and another good spot for a picnic. The urns that were removed and put in the museum are, in our reality, ‘consistent with cremation burials.’ Their accession to the museum in Preston happened right at the start of the decline of Preston North End FC from “The Old Invincibles” - to this day the only side to do the Double without losing a single game and without conceding a goal in any of their Cup games - to the depths of League Division 4. Coincidence? You be the judge.
> 
> Jane is somewhat off in describing rains of meat as ‘common’. I could find only one example in the literature: the Meat Shower of 1876 in Bath County, Kentucky.
> 
> Tourists in Preston: lived many years in that town - still live close enough that I can pop over to eg. case a museum for robbery - and the idea of anyone visiting as a tourist causes me bouts of the hollow laughing sound.
> 
> I’ve no idea if the tea and scones Harry samples are any good. Owing to an early and formative encounter with Edgar Allen Poe I am deeply unsettled by pendulums: sitting down for a brew and a snack next to a massive one is a non-starter for me. Horace the Elk, which Harry considers stealing, is familiar to anyone who grew up within school trip range of Preston after 1970. He escaped his hunters by diving into a lake, only to be dug up 13,500 years later, after the glacial lakes dried up and someone came to build a house on the spot he died. He still had harpoon points in him, including the one that collapsed his lung when he went under water. My ancestors went hungry that day.
> 
> Janet’s Foss and Runswick Bay are places with definite elf-legends attached to them. Janet’s Foss is the home of fairy royalty in a cave behind the waterfall (Foss is an old word for ‘waterfall’) and particularly pretty and well worth a visit, especially if you make time to take in Gordale Scar and Malham Cove while you’re in the vicinity. (It’s one of the places you might run into me on one of the aforementioned Wednesdays or Fridays.) The Hob Holes at Runswick Bay were home to elves who could cure whooping cough.
> 
> The Fenodyree of the Isle of Man are largely forgotten off the island, although very clearly related to the brownie/hob family of elves in being helpful until given clothes. I have taken the liberty of assuming the stories that depict them as a tribe have the right of it: several of the stories are of a single individual called Fenodyree. 
> 
> The Manx language is of the Goidelic rather than Brittonic branch of Insular Celtic - Irish/Gaelic rather than Welsh/Cornish/Breton, and was suppressed by the usual quiet undermining of anglophone encroachment (and such measures as requiring instruction in english in the schools the English Lords of Mann funded - the ‘Stanlagh’ Oshin rants about are the Stanleys who appear in Shakespeare’s Richard III and are Earls of Derby to this day, and were Lords of Mann from Henry IV’s time to the late 17th Century) to the point that the last native speaker died in the 1970s. Revival efforts are ongoing. 
> 
> I’ve taken liberties with the layout of exhibits in the museum, largely because I haven’t a bull’s notion what the curators were doing back in ‘04 so I’ve assumed the gallery they rob was then where it is now. I almost never go in the place. Like I say, pendulums. Astute readers will recognise the magical measurement techniques Jane uses from my first story, Ghost of Privet Drive.
> 
> (It’s called a recce shovel because you take it on a shovel recce. Which is reconnaissance to find a nice private spot where you can dig a small hole, and then fill it back in a short while later.)
> 
> With a tip o' the hat to Noxon for finding it https://www.google.com/maps/@53.7589748,-2.6983594,2a,59.6y,115.32h,78.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDkCG3qUsV43tByiO4p6uRw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656  
> 
> 
> Fanfic recommendation: Petrification Proliferation by White Squirrel on FFN (White_Squirrel on AO3), in which we see what a wizarding Britain with some common bloody sense might look like.


	6. ... Contact With Reality

DISCLAIMER: The survivors called it Cursed Child. They lived only to face a new nightmare: JK Rowling’s twitter feed.

(Bit late, this chapter. Toothache is _absurdly_ distracting. Also, the first chapter in which nobody gets killed. There’s violence, and aftermath-of-violence, but there just wasn’t room for a good merking in this bit.)

* * *

_“You should rest also,” Jane put in, “as you will be digging the hole. It cannot be done by magic, and must be put back as near undisturbed as possible. I have factored the symbolism of a warrior lowering himself to peasant work into my arithmancy.”_

_Harry shrugged. Clearly magic had a very different view of the proper function of a soldier than, for example, the army’s officers did. “Can’t be any worse a job than filling sandbags.”_

_“We only have a narrow window. We need a hole just over a metre deep dug in less than an hour.”_

_“I’ll bring my recce shovel, then.”_

-oOo-

**CHAPTER SIX**

**Bleasdale, Lancashire, 21 June 2004**

Harry scraped the bottom of the hole, peering down into the shadows cast by the harsh halogen worklights. He’d had to cut through a _lot_ of roots to get this far down and was glad he’d basically brought one of everything from the digging tools selection at the builders’ merchant they’d visited. Plus an axe, and a pruning saw he was fairly sure he’d ruined. That they could get away with screening off the circle and setting up worklights was about the only thing that was making it even possible: the hole had to be specific dimensions and the archaeological dig had been long enough ago that the soil had packed back down tight. If he ever had to do this again, he’d ask Jane to calculate the magical effect of doing the job with a rented digger.

Flinging the last handful of loose dirt and pebbles onto the linen sheet that Jane had laid down for the spoil, he fished a plumb-bob and tape measure out of his pocket to check that he’d got the size right and the sides plumb. Twenty-nine inches across, thirty-seven inches deep, at the dead centre of the large outer circle, with the dirt piled on the side away from the small inner circle that lay close to, but not quite touching, the eastern edge of the outer. All sides vertical, bottom as flat as could be managed with a small depression in the centre large enough to fit two 200-mil earthenware pots on a line perpendicular to one drawn through the centres of both circles. “Done,” he announced when he was finished with his checks.

“With five minutes to spare,” Jane observed, “And exactly to specification. Please clear away your tools to outside the henge.”

“Tra ta deiney gobbragh dy cairagh ta nyn daitnys gaase ass nyn obbyr,” Oshin said, as he snapped his fingers. The tools flew up from where they were laying to bundle in his arms - an impressive load for a three-foot-tall elf - and he stalked off.

Harry looked for a translation to Dobby, who shrugged. “Dobby thinks it is a proverb about having the right work to do?”

“He’s got a point,” Harry said, climbing out of the hole, “I _am_ supposed to be the officer here.” He had certainly dressed the part. After a considerable debate with Jane about what would be appropriate - starting from the assumption that ‘warrior’ meant ‘battle-dress’ - he had conceded that he wasn’t ‘lowering himself’ unless he was digging in his number two parade uniform. Dobby had found the wherewithal to make himself a set of Full Dress - so Harry had two normally dressed soldiers if you averaged the pair of them out: Oshin wore only a cut-down set of webbing and pouches. Dobby’s military peacocking, however, freed up Harry’s number twos to be restyled as his regimental officer’s parade dress. Which was going to need some _serious_ TLC after this night’s work.

“Your being the officer yet performing manual labour is the symbolic inversion of rank which forms part of the magical working,” Jane observed, shrugging off her coat and blithely ignoring Dobby’s visibly outraged sensibilities at Harry’s digging.

Harry shrugged. “You’re the expert. Although I will say both my elves have shown they can fight. Dobby plants bombs, and Oshin beats up ghosts. I didn’t even know that was _possible_.”

They’d been accosted on their way out of the Museum the night before by a belligerent, cigar-smoking prize-fighter-looking type in what looked like nineteenth-century workman’s clothes and great big hobnailed boots. His invitation to step outside, punctuated with a brandished fist that looked like it could deck a prize bull, would’ve been kind of intimidating if he hadn’t been translucent and devoid of all colour.

Harry had been pretty sure he couldn’t punch a ghost - however much said ghost was asking for it - but Oshin had popped into existence, leapt at the ghost, grabbed the lapel of his donkey-jacket with one hand and chinned the spectre good and proper with the other. It hadn’t been enough to put the ghost down, so Oshin had firmed up his grip by grabbing both lapels and delivered a full-force headbutt to the face.

“‘Cuinnag,” Oshin had grunted matter-of-factly after he’d ridden the collapsing ghost to the floor, heel-stamping him in the goolies for good measure as he climbed off.

Jane had cast a memory charm to ensure the ghost couldn’t make a witness statement, and admitted to having no more idea than Harry who he’d been. She suspected he might have been set to watch the museum by the Department of Mysteries, but insisted that that was pure speculation.

Jane paused in unbuttoning her blouse to remark, “Neither did I. The only other magical being I ever knew to be able to affect a ghost so strongly was a thousand-year-old basilisk. That Oshin can punch hard enough to measure up to a living embodiment of the principle of destruction is both interesting and welcome news.”

Noticing that Jane was getting undressed, Harry asked, “Do you need me in the nip too?”

“No. Straighten your uniform and kneel on the cushion there,” she indicated a small green velvet thing in the centre of the small inner circle, “facing the centre of the henge with your rifle held upright in front of you. Have you ever seen a depiction of a knight’s vigil?”

Harry nodded to say he had, and looked over at Dobby, “Rifle and bayonet, please, Lance Corporal.” As he was fixing his bayonet, he asked the now-naked Jane, “What’s this for?”

“There will be some magical energy released when the henge re-activates. Compared to the henge at full power, it is small and the risk of detection is low. It becomes zero if I use that power to enact a cleansing and purification spell upon you.”

“Cleansing me of what?” Harry asked as he knelt, bracing his rifle in front of him with the point of the bayonet on the ground, as he’d seen knights of old do with their swords when kneeling to pray.

“I will explain later. The critical moment approaches and I must begin casting spells. Do not move or speak, and make as little noise as you can bear to. Dobby, lights off please.”

The henge was plunged into barely-starlit darkness. After a quiet moment in which the whole world seemed to hold its breath, she lifted her wand like she was saluting with a sword and began chanting in what sounded like a cross between Oshin’s Manx and something like Welsh. After a minute or so and what sounded like seven repetitions of whatever she was saying, she turned to face away from Harry and with her wand grasped in both hands, stretched it up as high as she could, rising on her tiptoes.

The movement did interesting things to the musculature of her legs and arse. _For a purification rite it’s making me think some bloody impure thoughts,_ Harry mused, getting himself under control with a mental effort. 

Some more chanting followed, still in that strange language but this time with a more bouncing, lilting rhythm to it that was a visible strain on Jane’s ability to get it out while maintaining the posture she was in. Once she had finished that chant and relaxed into a more normal stance, she slowly paced around the circle, stopping to mutter something every few paces while pointing her wand in apparently random directions. From the little of her calculations and notes Harry had been able to understand, they were the directions of stars and constellations, the sun and the moon. While he’d been digging she had been placing markers for those around the outside of the henge. With the lights out he couldn’t see them, but she had those magic x-ray eyes.

Finally, crooning a sung incantation that sounded almost lullaby like, she returned to the centre of the circle and stepped into the hole Harry had dug, squatting down for a few moments once she was in. Standing up again, she levitated the pots into the henge and over to the hole where they vanished out of Harry’s sight.

Harry had been expecting that he’d finish the night’s work by back-filling the hole himself, with a side bet that maybe the elves would be allowed to do it and soothe their aggravated sense of the right order of things. He was therefore surprised when Jane swished and flicked her wand to levitate what looked like a barrow-load of soil into the hole with her and begin treading it down, chanting softly as she did so in time to the stamping of her feet.

A second barrow-load rose into the air and streamed back into the hole, and Harry began to notice a change in the quality of the air. A tang of ozone, a bite of cold on the warm summer night. A third barrow-load, and a soft, bluish glow fell over everything, coalescing about the tips of leaves and about the stones that poked up through the thin upland soil like tiny gas-flames. A fourth load: a high, keening whine at the very upper limit of hearing, and the distant sound of dogs howling in response. The final step, putting the carefully-cut turf back on the bare earth, ended with the blue ghost-fire erupting from the earth around Jane’s feet, coiling and spiralling up her legs and outlining her as though in St. Elmo’s fire.

She levelled her wand at Harry, her eyes burning with the weird-light of the uncanny blue flame, and he swallowed nervously remembering that she had told him to be as quiet as he could bear. The implication of which hadn’t caught up to him until this moment.

Her incantation switched to measured, clearly-enunciated latin. Which Harry recognised, but couldn’t understand more than a few words of - he recognised ‘ _in corpore sano’_ from the proverb. Her words made the blue fire rise around him, brightening and closing in until he could see nothing but dancing blue light. His skin felt greasy with static and a headache began to build behind his forehead.

Suddenly it was as if he was being stabbed in the forehead, right where his scar was, the scar he’d carefully not lied about to girls - a rueful and modest smile and a shrug and ‘can’t talk about it’ could really _sell_ the idea of the sort of modest hero a girl might want to get her leg over - and it felt like it was splitting his head in two. He screwed his eyes shut, gripped his weapon tighter until it felt like either the metal must crumple or his fingers tear themselves out at the roots. He was vaguely aware of a high, strained keening noise forcing its way between his clenched teeth and then he blacked out.

He woke up in the passenger seat of their car, somewhere on a motorway. No idea how long he’d been out. He had a peculiar nasty taste in his mouth and something on his forehead. Reaching up to feel, he discovered it was a gauze dressing, taped in place.

“Wha?” he asked, suddenly feeling groggy after the brief burst of clarity he’d enjoyed on waking.

“You fell unconscious at the climax of the purification. You endured considerably more pain than I had expected you to be capable of, and so the rite was unusually complete. Such purifications usually do not go so far as this one: the patient falls out of the locus.”

“Ge’ m’magic ba’?” Harry assumed someone had had a good reason for transfiguring his tongue into a slab of cotton wool. He asked the question because he remembered speculating, while he’d been kneeling there waiting, that Jane was going to have a go at getting the rest of the Ministry bastards’ memory-suppression magic off him.

“Highly unlikely. It was not impossible that the additional power would have undone all of the memory charms still on you, but I do not believe it has. I was more concerned about the taint of another wizard’s essence that was in your scar.”

“Y’mean Darth Bastard?” Harry had come up with that as a name for the enemy leader, whose name he knew not to say unless baiting an ambush. Darth Bastard was the obvious candidate: Harry’d run in to the fucker three times before his memory was wiped. He could’ve left his taint - _No, Harry, don’t giggle -_ on any of those occasions. Jane persisted with calling him The Enemy Leader, which was _dead boring_. 

“I do indeed mean the enemy leader,” she confirmed, dead boringly. 

Harry bit his lip: the giggles were very much upon him. “You’ve gi’ me sum’n f’ pain?”

“Yes. Your scar opened up again and is now a normal wound, but I prioritised leaving the scene over full treatment. I gave you a sedative, a painkiller, and a mood-lightening potion so that you would be agreeable when you awoke.”

“‘Gree’ble, a’righ’” Harry agreed, agreeably, and fell back asleep.

**Blackburn, Lancashire, 22 June 2004**

He awoke to an aching back and his cheek stuck to his pillow with drool. He’d been put to bed: whether by Jane or Dobby he had no idea. He suspected Dobby, who’d learned about the whole ‘batman’ tradition and seemed to like the idea. His uniform was hanging up to air, spotless clean and showing no signs of what he’d done in it the night before.

It wasn’t until he was showered, dressed, and downstairs in the kitchen, addressing a deep and gnawing hunger with a stack of egg banjos that Dobby whipped up for him that he realised he’d slept the clock round and lost an entire day. “Lance Corporal, where’s Jane?”

“Miss Jane will be back shortly, Lieutenant sah. She has gone for the weekly food-shop.”

“Did she say why she left me to sleep, like, thirty hours or so?”

“Miss Jane said the Lieutenant required his sleep for healing, Sah.”

“I reckon I’ll have to get the full story out of her when -” he was interrupted by the sound of her key in the front door.

Once she was in and the shopping restored to full size and handed off to the elves to store, she drew her wand. “I will perform charms to assess your health in full,” she said, her wand beginning to dance.

“You, ah, said it was another wizard’s _essence_ in my scar. What does that _mean_ exactly?” Harry was pretty sure that the schoolboy humour he was having an attack of wasn’t going to be welcome if he spoke it aloud.

“The precise nature of the phenomenon is not subject to consensus. ‘Soul’ is the word in english, but there are also aspects of mind and personality involved. That the soul is a distinct and unified thing is also controversial. Once one reads beyond the western european culture’s writings on the soul -”

“You can say christianity, you know.” Harry didn’t give a stuff one way or the other about religion, but Terri had had some pithy opinions on the subject. Richard had said that being educated by nuns had left her allergic to religion in general and christianity in particular, so she was quick to find fault with the ‘default christian assumption’ you got everywhere.

Jane gave him a head-tilt at his interjection, “Except that the theories about the soul which mainstream christianity adopted go back at least as far as Socrates, and not every branch of christianity adopted those ideas. The important point is that the concept is poorly understood even though magical effects appear to be in some sense mediated by and can act upon it.”

“And I had a piece of Darth Bastard’s soul-or-whatever in me?”

“Correct, or so runs the majority theory. Another possible theory is that he was making copies of his immaterial self, which by the magical law of contagion were permanently linked to him. As they survived the bodily death of the original, by the law of sympathy so did he.”

“Contagion and sympathy? That’s the voodoo-doll thing, yeah?” Harry had found school-level magical theory books in Jane’s travelling library, all the way up to Magic A-Levels, and found them very easy going. Probably because he’d read most of them before and was re-reading rather than coming at them cold.

“That is one application of contagion and sympathy, although the practise is not unique or original to vodoun. The use of poppets to cast curses at a distance is attested in Britain long before any possible contact with West Africa. There are many other cultures which invented the same or similar magic, not always for harmful purposes. However, the important point for present purposes is that the method the enemy leader used to anchor himself to life required pieces or copies of his soul, whatever that might actually be, to be placed in objects separate to himself.”

“And one of them was me?”

“Dumbledore theorised, I believe accurately, that this was done accidentally while murdering your parents and attempting to murder you. It may well have been that he intended to make another such object, which it is better not to name aloud,” which was code for there being a Taboo Curse on the word, “using one of your parents’ deaths or your death as the necessary sacrifice. Despite the failure, a copy or piece was taken or spontaneously detached from his soul and attached itself in some manner to you. The memory charms cast on you when you were fifteen also affected the piece, weakening it significantly by changing it enough to no longer have a strong contagious link to the enemy leader. This allowed the purification spell I performed to remove it entirely, assuming that the charms I just performed are accurate.”

Harry took a moment to sort through the implications. The obvious one was that his younger self, if the time-travel plan went through, would still have the thing in him. “Will we be able to do the same if we go back in time?”

“Regrettably not. The obliviations did not discriminate between the two minds they found in the same body, so weakening the soul-piece by the same method would wipe your mind just as much. Removing the soul-piece now, however, prevents it carrying information back in time to the head enemy. It also simplifies the time travel magic.”

Again, a moment to think through the implications. Having a bit of the enemy’s mind inside your own was bad news however you looked at it, but a simple ‘ _how would I use this?’_ mental exercise turned up a couple of obvious possibilities, the worst of which was: “And you didn’t mention this before because there was a chance he could use it to read my mind?”

Jane remembered to nod, this time, “Correct: the presence of a piece of himself in your mind allows the head enemy to perform the act of legilimency on you at zero range regardless of physical distance. While the contagious link was weak it was not non-existent and if he had become aware of it you would have become a serious security risk. There is a defence against magical mind reading which you will practise over the coming months: you will encounter enemy agents proficient in the art before you will meet the head enemy himself, and you now have information worth safeguarding. The first skill you will need to learn is meditation: it is foundational to protecting your mind.”

Harry assumed that this ‘legilimency’ was just the fancy wizard name for mind-reading, “I’m ahead of you with the meditation. Eight years of martial arts, remember?”

“Good. Much of our time between now and the winter solstice will be taken up with educating you on forms of magic you are not disabled in. Occlumency, as the opposing discipline to legilimency is called, is the most important. You may be further motivated to learn by the fact that absent incautious use of advanced techniques, occlumency comes with significant mental health benefits.”

“You had me at the Opsec and Persec benefits, actually.”

**4 July 2004, Blackburn, Lancashire**

It was not only meditation that Harry was ahead of the Occlumency game with. Mental organisation in the shape of a memory palace was an important supporting skill, and he’d had one for _years_. Even though he’d cheerfully hang the people who’d put all that mind-control magical bollocks on him, the irrational fear of forgetting that had reinforced the fake memories had made him something of a trained-memory hobbyist.

Jane had only observed that he needed to learn to separate his wuxin from the tai chi forms and martial-arts katas that he’d learned the discipline from. While a couple of weeks hadn’t been enough to get him there, he’d made progress. He could maintain the no-mind state for reasonable amounts of time, although he still had trouble getting into it in the first place without being able to move around. The meditation lessons from that one counsellor that Harry privately thought of as The Hippy weren’t much help, unfortunately.

Still, today he’d had one of his quicker successes and was taking some time to just _be_ . Jane was reading and making notes on a tome that didn’t just look like it could be used to bludgeon someone, it looked like it _had_ been used that way, and the elves were off somewhere about the house finding something to fix or clean. If there was any chance of them seeing the end of their lease on this house, their deposit was coming back to them in full.

Just being in this neighbourhood was entertaining in itself. The kids out in the street were playing some fast-moving game involving scooters, a football and regular cries of “Barley!” The neighbours to one side had a loud music playing that didn’t quite cover up the sex noises, and the smell of weed coming through the wall was stronger than usual. The neighbours to the other side were watching something about ballroom dancing with Bruce Forsyth in it. Loudly: they were an old couple. Several houses around about were working up to full-on Sunday Dinner, mixing the scents of English and Indian cooking pleasantly.

It was, bluntly, a _colourful_ neighbourhood. Vernon Dursley would’ve _hated_ it here. Harry reflected that he’d already made some if not friends, pleasant acquaintances. He’d overruled Jane’s caution about being sociable on the grounds that it was the kind of place where keeping to oneself stood out more than occasionally stopping to chat.

Harry’s calm wasn’t interrupted so much as textured by the appearance of a bright point of light that spun out and became a glowing, ethereal, goose that swooped around the room and backwinged to a neat landing in front of Jane.

It spoke, and Harry reflected that it was mildly surprising to hear a ghost-goose speak as it said, “Jane, dear, at safe house four we have rather a lot of wounded including one with the same trouble as you. The bastards have been taking revenge for something, and while I do like to hear that they’ve had a setback they’ve hurt a great many. Please come as soon as you can, as we need every wand and whatever healing supplies you can spare. All my love, Molly.”

Whoever this Molly was, she sounded like she was from somewhere around Birmingham, and quite upset. And, for all the message was bad news, the goose itself radiated a burst of good cheer and positivity before it faded away. Harry looked to the front window quickly, making sure nobody had seen a glowing goose fly around their living room, and without really thinking about his words said, “I’ll get a disguise potion and set the elves to packing all the healing potions and kit in one bag.”

Jane was already on her feet. “You are unable to cast healing spells or prepare potions.”

“I can comfort the wounded, lift and carry, and direct the elves,” he said, noting with a little regret that his meditative state was fading, “I’m sure I can talk fast enough that nobody guesses who I really am. Finally, I’m pretty sure I can gather some useful intel just from listening to people talk and putting it together. Did I know this Molly, before?”

“You did. Mrs. Molly Weasley was the mother of our mutual best friend at school. You stayed at their house several times.”

“Am I likely to run into him?” That could be difficult. Old friends could recognise each other despite all kinds of changes. Even, in Harry’s case, after getting his memory wiped. While he hadn’t known _why_ he trusted Jane on the first meeting, he very much had. 

“No. He was a casualty recently: he accepted an amnesty for resistance fighters. Mrs. Weasley informed me that he was subjected to personality changes of such a degree that she regards him as dead. It is a sensitive subject for her.”

“I can imagine,” Harry said, thinking that the magical world probably still had nastier surprises in store for him yet: every time he thought they’d hit rock bottom they kept digging. “Is that her motivation for being a resistance fighter?”

“She was a fighter before she began losing family. She has simply become more _intense_. She is widowed, and of her children, only three of seven are still alive to her. Two were sentenced to Azkaban, where it is believed they died, and Ronald was brainwashed, to use the vernacular term for it. Her surviving children are out of the country. The two oldest were working abroad at the time of the enemy coup d’etat. Her youngest daughter transferred to Beauxbatons the year after I finished there, and is married to a French wizard now.”

“Her husband?”

“Executed for treason: he was a long-time Ministry of Magic official and was almost certainly a spy for the resistance.”

Harry had noticed the gap. “You mentioned six children. What happened to the seventh?”

“Her third-eldest is a middle-ranking Ministry official. Mrs. Weasley regards him as a traitor, and refuses to speak of him. Mentioning him in her presence is likely to provoke her.”

Harry, unused to subtext from Jane, decided not to parse aloud the implication that one of the Weasley kids had basically joined the Wizard Nazis and used his father’s death as his entry ticket. An implication he’d had to prompt her to make, right after hearing about the bloke’s father being executed. Unemotional Jane might be, but the idea that someone could denounce his own father and get him sent to whatever wizards used for a gallows was sickening. He _certainly_ wasn’t going to say anything when he met Molly Weasley, because some emotional wounds no decent person would prod at.

Dobby popped in at that moment and saluted. “Anticipatin’ your order, Lieutenant Sah, Private Oshin is packing the last of the healing things.”

“Very good, Lance Corporal,” Harry said, returning the salute, “Add all of the non-magical medical kit to the bag, please. And I’ll want my desert uniform, take the badges off but put my corporal’s stripe on. I’ll go by my army rank rather than regimental today, Lance Corporal.”

“Why?” Jane asked, as Dobby saluted and popped away.

“Because I’m used to answering to my rank, and since I’m going to be wearing desert DPM I’m going to look weird enough to them that they won’t question anything further. If anyone asks why you brought me, it’s because I’ve got some basic medical training, which is sort of true what with first aid courses and all, and I offered to help.”

“At least some will object to a muggle presence.” Jane didn’t sound like she much gave a shit.

Harry shrugged his own indifference to such opinions. “I’ll be visibly giving orders to elves. Anyone asks me to cast a spell I’ll tell ‘em I snapped my wand years ago, and I’m glad I did with the way the magical world has gone since. Anyone asks you, which they probably will because most people are right nosey parkers most of the time, I’ve been helping you with the hunt for Harry Potter because I went muggle years ago so I know the country better.”

Jane nodded. “What disguise will you use?”

“Ageing potion and that skin tint stuff, the one that had the shop assistant thinking I was pakistani last week. Both last a full twenty-four hours and the only thing they leave from my wanted poster description is my eye colour, and the ageing potion washes that out a lot. Pity those coloured contacts haven’t come in at the opticians’ yet.” Harry only wore glasses on exercise and deployment these days, so the spectacles the wizarding world was expecting could be left at home. “And the other distinguishing mark they’ll be expecting from Harry Potter is the scar, and that’s been gone for a week now.” Apparently once the ‘evil’ was cleansed out of his scar, magical healing could make it go away completely.

Dobby reappeared at that point. “Your uniform of the day is laid out, sah!”

“Very good Dobby, and remember, my army rank of Corporal only while we’re on this operation. Ruse of war, see?”

Dobby grinned ear to ear. “Very good, _Corporal_ sah!” and saluted again.

**July 4 2004, Undisclosed Location**

Jane side-along apparated Harry to the safe house, into a dimly-lit hallway. Not dimly lit because the lights were turned down, but dimly lit because two chimney lamps in sconces on the left-hand wall were all the light there was. He chanced a quick look over his shoulder: either it was night where they were or the fanlight window over what was plainly someone’s front door was blacked out. Dobby and Oshin popped in behind Harry, and with a murmured “On me, elves,” he followed Jane down the hallway.

It looked from the decor like they were in a Victorian townhouse. A big one, that still had all its period features, blue-and-silver floral wallpaper, plaster mouldings and stained wood panelling everywhere they could be fit, and a strong smell of old tobacco and beeswax polish. The first door on the right, where Harry would have expected to find a living room, opened out into a much larger space than the hallway leading to it suggested. “Bigger on the inside?” he murmured at the back of Jane’s head.

“Quite usual for magical houses,” she murmured back, stepping aside to let him step through the doorway.

It looked like something out of the Crimean War. Poorly lit by candles and chimney-lamps with the occasional puddle of light from the end of wands, there were six rows of what looked like two dozen beds each. The beds were packed in with barely enough room for anyone to walk between. The walls were whitewashed brick stained with soot from the lamps in brackets every couple of metres, the ceiling high and dim, and huge but blacked-out windows at the far end.

Every bed was occupied, some of the patients moaning gently and maybe a third with family gathered round. One or two had sheets pulled up over the occupants’ faces. Harry was _particularly_ unimpressed with that little detail. Disrespectful to the dead, if nothing else, but the effect on the other patients’ morale was probably shocking.

Green-robed wizards and witches were flitting from bed to bed, casting spells with flicks of their wands, administering potions, and in one case smearing a withered-and-twisted-looking leg with some tarry-looking stuff using a cloth swab on the end of a stick. Harry revised his estimate from the Crimea back to the middle ages somewhere.

“Who’s in charge?” he asked.

“I do not know. I am looking for Mrs. Weasley, but she is not in this room.” She turned.

“I’ll get started here,” Harry said, frowning. “When you’ve found your contact, get her to point you at whoever’s in charge and have them come find me and we can have a chat about organising things a little better. Lance Corporal! Working party of yourself and Oshin, get this place cleaned. Work around the healers.”

“Sah!”

“Mie dy liooar Vainshtyr!”

Both elves saluted and popped away.

“And who might you be?” A tallish woman in one of those lime-green robes had come over. She looked old, Harry would guess not much short of seventy if he’d met her anywhere else, and apparently hadn’t got the memo that blue-rinses weren’t a thing any more. She had one of those large-nosed, narrow, hard faces that said north-country, and her accent matched. She could’ve just walked off the set of Coronation Street or Emmerdale from the sound of her. As for her age, Jane had told him magicals lived longer and aged slower if they took care of themselves, so she could well be older than he was guessing. 

That aside, the green robe did look like some sort of uniform, and all the ones he could see looked like they were doing medic stuff, so she did rightly have business with him. “Corporal. Which is a rank, not my name. Given the situation, we’re better off not using names. I’ve set my elves to cleaning for the time being. My associate received a message, a glowing bird sort of spell, from someone here saying you had casualties. I volunteered to accompany her, help as I can.” He extended a hand to shake.

The woman took it, and shook once, firmly. “Well, Molly did say she’d send a Patronus, so that vouches for you at least. I’m -”

Harry held up the hand that wasn’t being shaken. “No names, please. Legilimency _is_ a thing.” Harry had spent time thinking through the operational security implications of mind-reading, and decided to stop after a while before he went insane. Some common-sense precautions were probably worthwhile, though.

Old Medic, as Harry had labelled her in his mind, rolled her eyes. “It’s like Mad-Eye all over again, but I take your point. You live in the muggle world, from the looks of you, which also speaks in your favour.”

“Armed forces in particular. While my particular trade isn’t casualty care, we all get at least _some_ training.”

That perked her head up. “Do you know the muggle thing of sewing up wounds?”

“Know of it, had it done a couple of times. It’s usually done by people with a lot more training than I’ve had, though. I’m guessing magical healers don’t learn it, so I’m the best you’ve got?”

“We don’t and you are, but we’ve got a case where we can’t seem to close the cuts by magic. I understand the stitches hold the wound closed while it heals? We _were_ going to proceed by guesswork.”

Harry snorted his amusement. “I’ve got a couple of suture kits with me, it’s not like regular sewing. I reckon an actual trained healer will be able to reconstruct the right way of doing if I talk you through what was done to me?” 

“It’s more than we had to go on before. This way,” she spun on her heel and led him over to a bed where some poor kid, couldn’t have been more than fifteen, had been tormented with dozens of small cuts all over. He was plastered with gauze dressings held in place with bandages, sticky plasters apparently not having made it into the magical world, and dead to the world on sleeping potion. 

Old Medic gathered the nearest magical healers who didn’t have anything urgent to do. Getting Dobby to fetch him the non-magical supplies, Harry showed them butterfly closures, which it turned out they could make on-the-fly with sticking charms. They already understood about not leaving foreign matter or dead flesh in the wound and keeping it clean and dry, and local anaesthetic was just a wave of a wand to these people. Once Harry got to explaining what sutures were like - pulling up his shirt to show off a scar on his belly with its row of little dots alongside - all three of the magical medics who gathered round were relieved to learn that they weren’t expected to sew an actual seam. The suture kits were a hit: they _liked_ the idea of a pre-prepared kit for a particular job, another innovation that the magical world didn’t have, although they had a bit of a cross-purposes moment over sterilisation until Harry described what germs actually were and discovered that the magical world’s name for them was _animalcules_. 

Harry was glad of having refreshed his memory exercises recently, as it improved his recall of getting stitches put in by an army nurse who believed in talking patients through everything. Whether that was to keep Harry calm or _himself_ Harry had no idea, but it meant that he had at least one worked example in the forefront of his mind while he demonstrated his own seen-it-once understanding of the technique to the assembled medics.

When he was finished someone whispered in Old Medic’s ear and went off about some other errand. “Well, we’ve all taken copious notes, I see. I don’t suppose that those marvellous kits can be had in ordinary muggle shops?”

“Specialist suppliers only, I’m afraid,” Harry told him, “I think they don’t want the general public mucking about with these things. I liberated a case of them from Army stores, which I can leave with you to tide you over until you figure out a way of making your own. Or you could just keep one to use as a reference for transfiguring what you need as you need it?”

“That _might_ work for the tools and swabs, but we’d need a supply of the thread. Transfigurations expire rapidly inside the body.” That was one of the other magical medics, but the others nodded their agreement.

Harry took a moment to think: a lot of the dressings and medical supplies he could see were of the boiled-rags variety. These people needed _supplies_. And, well, here Harry was, a trained logistics bloke. “I’ll see what I can do. Medical supplies wholesalers can’t be that hard to find, and from the looks you could do with a lot more dressings, bandages, surgical tape, and things like that? I can do some unorthodox requisitioning and send one of my elves back with a load, assuming they can find their way back here now they’ve been once. I’ll have a chat with whoever’s in charge of your stores here and find out what’ll help most.”

All of the magical medics grinned at the prospect of having more stuff to work with. “Unorthodox requisitioning?” one of them asked.

Harry grinned back. “Well, since it’s wartime, it’s not ordinary stealing, is it?”

Old Medic straightened up. “As it happens, that message I just got was from the same Molly who sent the message that brought you here. And she’s the keeper of this particular safe house, so I shall take you along with me.”

Molly turned out to be a skinny, short redhead with a touch of grey at the temples. Jane had given him enough information on the woman to know she was in her early fifties. Unusually for a witch, she looked it - a phenomenon of magical ageing that made Harry feel a bit better about being constantly asked for ID in pubs in his mid twenties. Despite Jane’s assurances that he’d known this woman, he didn’t get any sense of recognition. Perhaps the war had changed her beyond easy recognition?

“So you’re Jane’s young man,” she said, once Old Medic had made the introduction and gone back to work. She was in the kitchen of the safe house, and gave every impression of regarding it as her own personal throne room, hip-leaning against a heavyweight, old-fashioned kitchen table. The room was expanded as the others were, and most of the space had been used for a very great deal of shelving that went all the way up to the high ceiling. Molly had kept the main kitchen area as an actual kitchen, albeit one that looked like it had last been refitted around the Edwardian era. It had what looked like a wood-fired range covered in simmering cauldrons and the table was covered in chopping-boards that were strewn with the remnants of herbs and less-identifiable ingredients.

Harry shrugged. “I’m not sure she’s able to have a young man in the sense you’re implying,” he said, “Some sort of curse, she said. No emotions.”

“The Curse of the Stone Heart, yes.” Molly flicked her wand, casually. The spoons in the cauldrons various began, stopped, or reversed their stirring. “I ever get my hands on that bitch that thinks it’s _funny_ , that’ll be a big part of what I’ll be seeing her suffer for. We just got another one, Polly Westenberg’s daughter. The safe house her parents ran, they evacuated it in time, but she got caught. Jane’s explaining to her how to survive the curse. There’s some philosophical thing that keeps her going, she says. Didn’t work for Pandora’s little girl, hasn’t worked for anyone else, but the fact that it worked once keeps us all in the grip of cruel hope.”

Harry could see her point. About the hope being cruel, at least. He’d a lot of memories he was sure were genuine of his early years with the Dursleys, hoping for a change or an improvement and being disappointed. It’d taken Richard and Terri a while to get him past the refusal to hope that he’d learned from Vernon and Petunia. He sighed. “Hope’ll get you killed all right,” he agreed. “Not hoping’s kept me alive more than it hasn’t, that’s for sure.”

“That what sent you off to the muggle world?” She asked it kindly. Her not-quite-Birmingham accent had a bit of a rural burr to it, making it easy for her to sound artless and concerned.

“Looking at the magical world,” he said, “I’m fairly sure I’m better off there.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are. I am too, once I got over the shock of it all, and since I didn’t have my husband any more with the knowledge of muggle things. Now, as far as the muggles are concerned, I’m a dairywoman called Mrs. Walters. I got a job at a farm dairy that was starting up cheese-making. I didn’t think cheese would be all that different from what I knew how to make. And, bless me! It wasn’t. Some of the things I used to do with charms and potions are done with machines and chemicals, not that I don’t help things along with a charm or two discreetly, but cheese is cheese. And the making of Warwickshire Blue, the muggles had forgotten that entirely! I pretended I had some notes from my grandmother and a little piece of the blue saved in a pot that my mother gave me. That last bit was true, as it happens, one of the few things I had to remember her by after they burned our house down to drive the point home after they executed my husband. It seemed only right to let them have the benefit, they’re lovely people. And they’ve a fine herd, good milkers, and they’ve been good to me once they heard I was widowed and all my children abroad, I didn’t tell them about the ones that died in prison. And just this last year we won a prize for two of the varieties we’re making! Two varieties, no less! Still, have a seat and a cup of tea, young man, and let me take the measure of you. What brings you back to the magical world?”

Harry smiled as the verbal tide rolled over him. Terri had a scouse-Irish mother, who was probably grieving even as they spoke, and she’d had that same ability to just talk at you without needing to take a breath. Once he was seated at the table - there was a clear space at one end, apparently just for sitting at to take a break - with a mug of strong tea and some cheese and biscuits, he said, “Jane needed someone that knew the muggle world and the army. She’s trying to track someone down. Although for security’s sake that’s all I’m saying on that score.”

“You had elves in the muggle army?”

“Maybe in the older regiments. I recruited mine for my own personal regiment just recently. Homeless elves seem to thrive on it, if they’re willing to take the shilling.”

“Well I never. I will say I’m glad of the help, it’s been mad here this last week with all the reprisals going on. _Those people_ are trying to find out who set an ambush somewhere up north.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Someone’s fighting back hard, then?”

“That they are. And I’m glad to hear it. The more of them that are put in the ground, the better I’ll like it. And if their reprisals convince a few more to fight, I shan’t grieve over that either.”

“Cold,” Harry observed, “but I’ve seen how insurgencies work from the other side and I can’t say I don’t think that’s how it works.” He was starting to wonder how many Mollys he and his had wound up and set loose against the world. The kind of woman who could talk about killing and how enemy reprisals would help the cause without changing her tone one whit from the same tone she used to talk about her prize-winning cheeses. It struck him that she was bloody _dangerous._

“Practical,” she said, “a lot of them are still trusting in authorities and great men to look after them, and they don’t learn better unless they have their noses rubbed in it, think they can go along to get along or some such nonsense. Oh, if I had my time over again I dare say I’d teach my children to be a little less respectful of that sort. I think Dumbledore realised how hard he’d failed, at the end there, and he was one of those so-called great men. He left me instructions to help Jane, he had a task he was giving to her. Wouldn’t say what, he had a maddening way about him with such things, and we all trusted him. But if you worked with him long enough, you could put together all the little hints and turns of phrase. He wasn’t _quite_ as clever as he thought he was, poor man.”

Harry had been taken a little by surprise by that ‘time over again’ turn of phrase, but didn’t think he’d startled enough to notice. “Jane has mentioned him. She has an, ah, unique perspective on the man, what with the whole, you know -” he waved a hand at his head to indicate the whole no-emotions thing. Hoping he’d not given anything away, he picked up one of the crackers with a little slice of cheese on, it’d be a good subject change and probably safe from Opsec risks.

Molly watched him take a bite with a clear look of approval on her face. “I dare say she does. She’s said the lack of sentiment makes her a better fighter, and she’s put down nearly as many as me at this point, so I don’t doubt it lets her see clearer in other ways as well. How do you like the cheese?”

Harry took a moment to chew and swallow. “Bloody good scran, you earned that prize. And yes, Jane said something about her not being emotionally compromised the way Dumbledore is.”

“Well, it’s good to hear. Tell me, how much of being Harry Potter do you remember?”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> The ghost was James “Touch” Duckworth, a prizefighter, horse-breaker and all-round ‘local character’ whose manslaughter in a drunken brawl - felled with a single blow, which caused him to break his skull on a stone pillar - across the road from the back of the Museum was one of the big news stories of 1848. (To the best of my knowledge his ghost has never been sighted … by muggles.) He was also famous for keeping a pet bear that he’d set on bailiffs and debt collectors who visited him. They don’t make ‘em like that any more, for which I think we can all be grateful.
> 
> (Oh, and if Nearly-Headless Nick can wear a ruff despite dying a half a century before they came into fashion, Touch can wear a donkey jacket despite dying thirty years before they were invented.)
> 
> I’ll apologise now to any Manx speakers reading this: the sources I’ve got for the language (which I speak one close relative of very badly indeed) short of signing up for an online course are all really old. Also I can’t spell in any gaelic language worth the spit to insult me with. Chalk it up to Oshin mangling Manx the way Dobby does English.
> 
> Astute readers will note that Jane is actually getting some use out of the astronomy classes Hogwarts made everyone take. (My own headcanon is that it used to be really useful in magic, became superseded, and persists Because Tradition. Regrettably common in education, don’t get me started.)
> 
> “Batmen” were officers' servants/orderlies, usually a private soldier, but wasn’t unknown for a gentleman going to war to bring his valet along with him. (And for a batman to follow his officer into civilian life as a valet.) 
> 
> Egg banjo: fry an egg. Slap it between two slices of bread and take a bite of the resulting sandwich. Now, mime the action you perform when, with a sandwich in one hand, you try and wipe up the egg yolk that just ran down the front of your shirt. Congratulations! You’re playing the egg banjo! Goes double for the not-in-a-hurry self-indulgent version made with three eggs, chili sauce and a healthy dollop of the chutney of your choice. Breakfast of champions, that.
> 
> “Incautious use of advanced techniques”: because Snape is supposed to be a brilliant occlumens, but for a master of a discipline that’s all about the self-control and concealment of emotions he rarely demonstrates either. So the advanced techniques of false memories he used in order to deceive Voldemort? He misstepped while learning them and his mental health is shot on top of the cultivated negative emotional states needed for the Dark Arts. (“You have to mean it,” per Bellatrix Lestrange.)
> 
> While Harry is meditating he gets a taste of life as far removed from Little Whinging as can be. It’s the kind of neighbourhood that JKR sneered at as the run-down “Spinner’s End” - old mill-workers’ terraced houses in row on row. They’re what southerners like JKR think about when they trot out the tired old ‘grim up north’ stereotypes. They’re actually nice places to live, although I will admit to mixing together several years of local colour from my own and friends’ experiences of living in such neighbourhoods. They’re not usually that lively all at once!
> 
> The TV show about dancing is the first series finale of Strictly Come Dancing (retitled to Dancing with the Stars when the format got exported to the US). 
> 
> Harry and skin tint: the Potters have your classic insular celt looks, being as they are from the celtic fringe (As witness Hagrid flying over Bristol to get to Surrey from Godric’s Hollow) and as such requires only a deep enough tan to pass for Indian/Pakistani to the kind of person that hurls racial abuse at such in the street. (Personal experience on this one, alas.) 
> 
> (While I have time for the widespread headcanon of Harry being of asian descent, you do have to change Vernon a lot before he’ll permit someone non-white to live in his house even if kept in a cupboard. Strong AU, making Vernon the vanishingly rare non-racist gammon.)
> 
> Animalcules: yes, that is the old word for microorganisms and I really think we shouldn’t have stopped using this charming word. The notion that they cause disease has been discovered and lost several times throughout history.
> 
> Fic Recommendation: Both ‘The Meaning Of A Second Chance’ and ‘Double Time’ by Q.Elwyn.D on FFN, who is Elwyn on AO3. Two interesting re-do fics from an excellent writer.


	7. Kitchen Arithmancy

DISCLAIMER: JK Rowling does  _ not _ want a phased plasma fanfic in the 40-watt range.

* * *

_ Molly watched him take a bite with a clear look of approval on her face. “I dare say she does. She’s said the lack of sentiment makes her a better fighter, and she’s put down nearly as many as me at this point, so I don’t doubt it lets her see clearer in other ways as well. How do you like the cheese?” _

_ Harry took a moment to chew and swallow. “Bloody good scran, you earned that prize. And yes, Jane said something about her not being emotionally compromised the way Dumbledore is.” _

_ “Well, it’s good to hear. Tell me, how much of being Harry Potter do you remember?” _

-oOo-

**Chapter 7**

**Undisclosed Location, 4 July 2004**

Harry froze, the second half of the cracker just short of his lips.  _ Think fast, Harry _ . “Do you mean any Harry Potter in particular?” He asked, putting the morsel slowly and carefully back down on the plate, “I think I can unbend on operational security enough to tell you it says ‘Henry’ on my birth certificate, if that helps?”  _ Rule One of Occlumency: don’t lie any more than you absolutely have to _ .  _ Mislead with truthful statements or remain silent, because truthsaying is the most basic discipline of legilimency _ . 

Jane had put a magical bug on him so she could come help if he heard him get into magical difficulty, so it was just a question of how long it was before she could get away and come help with this utter bollocks of a  _ mess _ .

“I dare say it does,” Molly said, a quiet little smile playing about her lips, “I often wondered whether you were a Henry or a Harold behind all the guff they gave out about you, or if your parents really named you just Harry. I don’t think I met your mother above twice, and your father maybe a time or two more than that, so I never knew, you see? And the first time I properly met you when my boys brought you home to visit, well, I can’t recall whether it went out of my mind to ask or I couldn’t think of a  _ way _ to ask. Even if I had, I dare say you’d no idea yourself, what with those awful people you were given to by Albus, and he was too busy to contradict the legend everyone was building. Or had some reason for not contradicting it, you could never tell with Albus. It was cleverness of that sort that got him killed, of course, once they’d winkled him out of his place of power at Hogwarts.”

Harry stayed still and quiet, trying his best -  _ don’t get desperate, desperation is the opposite of what I want here _ \- to get into a no-mind state in which he’d have no facial tells that’d give this  _ terrifying _ woman any clue she was right. That she was speculating out loud was disaster enough: if anyone overheard her it was a fucking  _ catastrophe _ . He couldn’t  _ see _ anyone listening in, but even without magical eavesdropping that guaranteed nothing. You could get discreet RF bugs from fucking  _ Argos _ these days. He had a pistol, but until he had time to carve runes into some bullets for it, it was good for exactly one shot against a wizard or witch, and he  _ knew _ he wasn’t quick enough or accurate enough or straight-up  _ cold-blooded _ enough to draw, shoot and kill with the one shot he’d get. He carefully set the thought aside. So far, beside the alarming ability she’d shown to see through his disguise, she seemed friendly enough and Jane vouched for her. The problem was she was being  _ too _ friendly without any thought for security. 

She kept talking despite his silence. “As for me knowing it’s you, dear, well, I’m prouder than I used to be that I raised a pack of mischievous hellions. It’s not the first time I’ve seen ageing potion used, you see? Very common article among magical children bent on getting into things they shouldn’t. And while those eyes of yours have aged, I saw them across the breakfast table for weeks at a time. I’d know them anywhere, I always remember thinking you’d grow up to be quite the heartbreaker, bless you. My daughter’s head wasn’t the only one you turned, oh no. Do you know I was the only adult you’d look in the eye without hiding behind your fringe? I was always better with other peoples’ children than my own.”

She said the last bit wistfully. It wasn’t just listening to Albus Dumbledore she regretted, Harry deduced. If she’d lost four of seven kids there was probably plenty  _ there _ to regret. Having one of her kids turn traitor and the other turn himself in for an amnesty offered by obvious villains - although without walking a mile in the lad’s shoes Harry wasn’t going to call him an idiot quite yet - almost certainly came with a healthy ration of guilt all by itself.

“What that told me about your home life, well, I told myself it couldn’t be that bad, not if Albus had been in charge of placing you there. He  _ surely _ would have seen to it you were decently looked after. Some children are just naturally shy, after all. That’s what I told myself. Molly, I said, it’s  _ not your place _ to get involved. Well, now we know where  _ that _ sort of thinking leads, and here I sit hoping for more reprisal raids to snap more people out of the self-same thing I was guilty of myself.”

“Molly,” Harry said, gently, unsure where the words were coming from, “I want you to think about who might be listening in. That kid you knew back in the day, well, wherever he is now - that kid ought to be the last person you should be talking about out loud where anyone can hear.”

As if on cue, there were footsteps in the hallway, and the kitchen door opened. “See?” Harry said, gesturing over his shoulder, “whoever that is almost certainly doesn’t need to know, and in a world with legilimencers, keeping information out of heads that don’t need it is  _ important _ .”

“The Corporal is correct, Molly,” came Jane’s voice from behind Harry, “and in addition the possibility of magical eavesdropping must be borne in mind. I heard everything you said via the listening charm on the top button of the Corporal’s shirt. I will now perform charms to find -”

Molly slapped her palm on the kitchen table. Not forcefully, but hard enough to interrupt. And, apparently, to close the door behind Jane firmly but without, to Harry’s ear, slamming it. Into the silence, she said, “I’ll thank you to remember, Jane, that I am a kitchen witch,  _ in her kitchen _ . One of seven kitchens, no less, and I’m sure you’re the last person I need to teach basic arithmancy to.”

“What is a kitchen witch, please? I am unfamiliar with the term.” Jane asked, causing Harry’s eyebrows to lift in surprise. He’d sort of got the impression that Jane knew at least the basics of  _ everything _ magical, enough to at least know where to look something up.

Molly chuckled. “You’re politer about that than you used to be, I have to say. Poor Luna used to get _so_ _frustrated_ with your overconfidence in your scholarship. You’re familiar with Domains and Places of Power, yes?” Harry could _hear_ the capital letters.

“Yes -” Harry didn’t turn to look at Jane, but he could tell that she had interrupted herself. He’d not objected in the slightest to her habit of rattling off definitions and useful information whenever they came up. He needed to learn, and fast, so it was helpful, but he suspected it was a bit annoying to everyone else and she knew it.

“Well,” Molly went on, “the right sort of kitchen, the sort that’s the beating heart of a home, can be a Place of Power for the witch whose Domain it is. Or wizard, I suppose, if he could get over himself enough to get himself well hefted in such a kitchen. He’d have to be a muggle-born, I suppose, Sandra at the dairy told me all about that there feminism all the young muggle ladies are after these days. It’s certainly politer and more constructive than the hexes, hatpins and howlers approach I grew up with. That aside, I’ve my own home and the five safe-houses I do for, and it turns out the dairy counts as a kitchen once it became everything that the farm revolved around, and they all treat me like I’m in charge of it. Seven kitchens, Jane. Seven, no less. Gives me power when I’m out of doors, for all it’s less than I have here at my table.”

“Nevertheless, we might be overheard -”

Another slap on the table. “We are in  _ my domain and place of power _ , young lady, and only one-seventh part of it, at that.  _ Nothing _ happens here save by my let and leave. Your listening charm worked because I permitted it, not otherwise. And I can see you thinking there has to be a way around it, and I’ll tell you, not one that’s been discovered in a thousand years and more. A wizard in his tower and a witch in her kitchen, as my granny would say it, may she rest. For some reason the muggles in this country forgot the tradition of keeping a poppet of their local witch in the kitchen to boost her power to help them, but they still do it in Germany and Scandinavia.”

Harry had swivelled his chair so he could see both women, and Jane was the nearest he’d yet seen her to displaying open emotion. She was somewhere between confused and frustrated. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio,” he quoted at her.

“Hah!” Molly exclaimed, and then laughed aloud. Once she’d subsided, “Yes, Shakespeare. Warwickshire lad, you know. Knew how to spin pretty words, that boy did. I’m kin to the Hathaways he married into, on my mother’s side, they’re one of those families with a foot in both worlds, always have been. But I’m getting off the point here, which is that  _ he _ -” she pointed at Harry, “used to be Harry Potter and I was wondering how much of it he remembers. And why, having found the poor boy, you didn’t tell anyone, not least me. You know Albus told me to help you all I can.”

Jane pulled out a chair and took a seat. “I have modified Dumbledore’s plan for this eventuality.”

“You have? Good. I dare say whatever he came up with was too clever by half and ignored most of the problem anyway. And he had an awful habit of assuming that what was taught at Hogwarts was the beginning and end of magic, too, which as Harry here rightly observes ain’t necessarily so. So, what help can I be? And while you’re thinking on that, remember that you’ve just learned I’m a lot stronger than you assumed. Seven kitchens, remember. Harry, dear, more tea?”

“Please, Molly,” he said, passing over his mug, “and if there’s some pickles to go with that cheese?” 

Molly visibly brightened at the prospect of feeding him. “Mostly shop-bought stuff, I’m sorry to say, but it ain’t bad for all that. Piccalilli or Branston? Or if you prefer something that isn’t a tracklement I’ve got some spiced brown pickled onions that Mrs. Sheasby who I know from the Women’s Institute does. What she does with the spices isn’t much short of magical, she’s one that didn’t miss her Hogwarts letter by all that much, I reckon.”

Harry loved pickled onions so opted for those. Somehow - clearly kitchen witch magic at work - cheese and biscuits with his tea rapidly came to include a bowl of deliciously herby leek-and-potato soup from what turned out to be the only cauldron on the range that wasn’t brewing potions, bread fresh out of the oven under the range, butter that had  _ definitely  _ never seen the inside of a supermarket, and the promise of scones with home-made summer fruit jam and clotted cream to follow. And an apology that she only had shop-bought crackers by way of biscuits for the cheese.

Jane had acquiesced in refuelling herself, and while they ate Molly commandeered the Elves of the Regiment to put a bowl of soup and a quarter of a cottage loaf in the hands of everyone the Healers didn’t have on nil-by-mouth, with scones, butter and jam for anyone that asked. Harry noticed that both elves treated Molly like she was the last link in the chain of command before the Queen Herself, with inch-perfect drill and salutes sharp enough to cut yourself on. They were beings of magic, he supposed, recognising the power she wielded. And that recognition made him feel, suddenly, a  _ lot _ better about having met Molly Weasley.

Once they had eaten - and the elves had reported back that they had the ground floor clean and the deceased laid out respectfully in the cellar, a detail that caused Molly to mutter about having a  _ word _ with the healers and the Order members who were supposed to be acting as orderlies - Jane was the first to speak. “Mrs. Weasley, how much do you know of the plan Dumbledore entrusted me with?”

“More than he  _ thought _ he told me, I’m pretty sure.”

“Not sure it’s important immediately,” Harry said, interrupting her because he’d had chance to think while getting his soup down him, mostly about possible plans to put forward that  _ absolutely did not mention time travel _ “There are some immediate actions-on for the casualty rush you’ve just had, probably some bollockings to deliver, and since you’ve got me here as a trained logistics specialist I might be able to help with the organisation of these houses for the bits outside your kitchens. Fresh pair of eyes, if nothing else. More important, though, is getting people out of the way of reprisal raids. Jane tells me that the muggle borns get lifted out of the country as soon as they’re detected so they can go be refugees, yes?”

“They do, yes. It’s the main use for these safe houses, giving the poor dears somewhere they can’t be detected while their parents are shutting their lives down to emigrate.”

Harry nodded along, wizards might be able to organise a trip abroad with a few galleons for a portkey, but the muggle side of things took a  _ lot _ more work. Even just going abroad for a year or two of expat work was a big deal, and emigration was a whole lot more than that. And while there was probably some paperwork - parchmentwork? - for magical emigration, it almost certainly wasn’t up to modern computerised standards of bureaucracy, which begged Harry’s next question, “Why aren’t more magical families emigrating?”

Molly nodded her acknowledgement of it being a good question, “There would be, and in the first few weeks there were, but Those People realised there wasn’t much point taking over the government if they didn’t have anyone to lord over and closed down all the avenues of foreign travel to anyone that wasn’t what they saw as the right sort, and even  _ they _ could only go if they were leaving family behind. Portkeys, carriages, broom flight across borders, all closed down except to them as has more courage than sense. There’s an emigration scheme, but you’ve to leave  _ everything _ behind. And I mean  _ everything _ , the few that tried it turned up in the countries they were moving to with no memory of ever having had children, to go along with losing everything but the clothes on their backs and their wands. And if they weren’t five-generation purebloods, they lost the wands too. We still don’t know what happened to the children. And ain’t told them that lost them that they’re gone, either, it’d be too cruel.”

Harry was getting that feeling he always got when things were too much to deal with. Floaty in the head, calm, out of himself. Almost as good as the meditative state for calm, and it let him think quickly and clearly. “Do they watch the non-magical ports? Airports? The channel tunnel?”

“They probably don’t, no. Most of ‘em won’t have any idea there even  _ is _ a tunnel under the channel, nor that those little specks in the sky can fly you halfway around the world and serve you dinner on the way. They  _ might _ watch the ports, but it’ll be a half-hearted thing, they haven’t a bull’s notion just how many muggles there actually are, I certainly didn’t until I crossed over. And I see what you’re driving at, but a lot of these people, they wouldn’t know where to begin if you told them to book a muggle railway or ferry ticket, and they haven’t a hope with air travel at all. Add on that a lot of them are still scared of muggles - the witch hunts are the first thing they teach in magical history, and I was  _ right  _ surprised to learn how differently they’re remembered by muggle historians - and getting them to shift is quite the proposition. That’s assuming they don’t think it ain’t going to get worse and will probably all blow over soon.”

Harry had been thinking while Molly had been talking: he’d seen the same thing on the muggle side. “Sounds about right, refugees leave at one of two times, late and too late. The reasons are probably similar on the muggle side, too. I think the trick’s going to be just organising it all for them so they don’t get daunted by the size of the job. I mean, I’ve been to a dozen countries on three different continents, and never once bought my own ticket. All I had to do was turn up when and where I was told and get on whatever plane they pointed me at. Jane and I have some time to kill between now and a particular date we can’t miss, and we’re going to fill it with operations to throw as much bollocks at the enemy as we can come up with so they can’t stop what we’re planning. Or have a harder time of it than they might have otherwise, at least. If they’re losing essential workers left, right, and centre that’s only going to help, right? On top of it being the right thing to do, of course. We’re probably going to provoke a lot more reprisals before we’re done, so getting the civilians out of the way first is only fair.”

Jane, whether or not she had cottoned to what Harry was  _ actually _ trying to do, said, “Harry is correct. The enemy recruits from the uppermost and lowest echelons of magical society. Removal of the technically skilled workforce between those two socio-economic strata will hamper their ability to operate significant governmental functions, and it is those elements of society that are best placed to afford to relocate.”

“Good,” Harry said, “so as I see it we’ve got two problems. First is evading the restriction on magical travel which we can do by hiding them among muggle travellers. They’ll need to be properly briefed so they blend in, and reassured that nobody’s going to dunk them in a pond or burn them at the stake or something. The worst cases are going to need to be accompanied by someone who can keep them from making complete tits of themselves and drawing attention. The second problem is the whole leave-everything-behind thing, nobody’s going to go if they arrive with just the clothes on their backs. Jane, how easy is it to make those space-expanded things so there’s no magic detected from the outside?”

“The charms against scrying are technically challenging, but for the minority of mages capable of meeting that challenge, not time-consuming or exhausting.”

“So you can furnish each family with a shipping container’s worth of luggage that’ll go in an ordinary suitcase? Maybe something on it that’ll make a muggle customs bloke ignore it?”

“Again, technically challenging but not difficult for those equal to the task.”

Molly was frowning in thought. “How do we get all these one-way tickets past the muggle authorities? Everything I see on the news since that business in New York with the aeroplanes says that they’re watching for suspicious travellers. With the best will in the world, even the half-blood families have pure-blood members who are going to stand out.”

Harry shrugged. “They won’t act the same kind of strange as someone who’s planning to blow up an aircraft, and security’s lower on ships and trains anyway. As for suspicious patterns of travel, we can buy return tickets to tourist destinations, maybe even buy package tours on last-minute deals. Set up a couple of dummy corporations and send anyone who fits  _ that _ profile as business travellers.” 

“You know how to do that?” Molly was looking at him with open bafflement.

Harry grinned back, “For the three years after they wiped my memory, my foster-dad was a company-commercial lawyer. He kept trying to nudge me toward his line of work, even though I kept telling him that sitting behind a desk sounded like hell to me. I still picked up a thing or two, and if you want a shell company there are firms that’ll set one up for you. All you need is a credit card and a telephone for just one, and if you want a lot of them they’ll run you a tab with thirty-day terms. I’m probably missing some of the subtleties, but to hear Richard talk so were most of his clients. It’ll let us launder wizard gold into the muggle system without involving the goblins, too.” From Jane’s description of Gringotts, the goblins wouldn’t give a shit about evasion of currency-exchange laws, but also didn’t give a shit about banking confidentiality.

“The wizard gold is not worth very much,” Jane put in, “A galleon is pure gold but under the enchantments the actual coin is very small indeed. The goblins made sure that each galleon was five pounds’ worth of gold exactly as mandated by treaty.”

Harry waved off the concern. “So use it to buy commodities from wizards in bulk to sell to muggles and convert it that way. Anything that you can do that with is goods taken out of the magical economy and money dumped back in. I doubt we’ll be doing it long enough to really make a harmful difference to the magical economy, but every little helps as the advert says.” He didn’t know  _ much _ economics, but he knew that matching the money supply to the goods in circulation was important.

“Assuming all of these things can be made to work, how are we going to find people who want to move?” Molly asked.

“You’ve got a house full right now. And four other houses that you know of. And everyone  _ they _ can persuade to leave before they go themselves. Get this Order that Jane mentioned to pass the word, tell them to prioritise skilled wizards and witches and their families. Ministry workers who’ve realised they can’t work within the system and want a way out. People who supply goods and services to the Ministry and got caught in reprisal raids. Or are worried they’ll get caught in the  _ next _ reprisal raid. Jane can make the luggage they’ll need, and teach the method to everyone who’s up to it, and ask them to send back the luggage for the next wave. We’re going to have to move fast, because in the enemy’s shoes if I noticed it happening I’d start taking hostages.”

“It’d be Claig Castle all over again,” Molly agreed, nodding, “I was one of the first in there, the camp where they were holding the muggleborns and their families. Jane was part of the support group for that raid, the last big one we did.”

“There were atrocities,” Jane agreed.

“And you only saw it  _ after _ we’d cleaned up the worst,” Molly said, a bitter note in her voice, “That was the day my third child died in my heart. He’d already thrown us over for a Ministry career, and when his father told him what was coming he said he’d try and work within the system. Ha! There’s no working within that system, this country won’t be clean again until the whole lot’s torn down and  _ burnt _ . And to think I encouraged the little shit when he said he wanted to work at the Ministry.”

Harry didn’t think he could say anything that wouldn’t make Molly’s obvious hurt worse. Jane was also silent. Harry noticed that Molly had said nothing about her son having betrayed his father: it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that it’d been kept from her to spare her the heartbreak.

“There’s one other thing,” Molly went on, “I hear from my eldest - his mother-in-law is something important in the French ministry - that a lot of continental countries are watching British magical expats carefully. They think british purebloods are going to start spreading neogrindelwaldism, so anyone we send is going to be watched.”

Jane had the answer to that, “Brief the transportees. Explain to them that being under auror surveillance is preferable to being dead, and that they should be as cooperative as possible. Your Charles faces the same problem in Romania. He told me that he got on friendly terms with his assigned magical law enforcement agent to the point of having regular drinks with the man. It allowed him to be instrumental in the apprehension of a Death Eater spy at the Dragon Reserve.”

“That’d work,” Harry agreed, “not that everyone’s going to get that lucky with their local Special Branch man, but making the effort will go a long way in letting them settle and make new lives. Plus we should spread them out as much as possible, the last thing they want to do is form expat ghettoes. They need to blend in, treat it as a new start.”  _ Until the winter solstice, _ Harry thought,  _ although it’s probably best not to assume we’re going to succeed. This is a way for the plan to fail safe. _

Molly considered that for a moment and then nodded. “I’ll try and arrange a meeting here for, say, a week’s time to sort out the details. Maybe sooner. More than a few of the order are muggle-raised halfbloods, able to pass. If you can brief them on the clever stuff with the companies and the travel booking, that ought to spread the load. And you’ll need the spare time, because that as you did up Northumberland way? You should be doing more of that. Make them shit themselves every time they answer the Taboo. And don’t look at me like that, it leaked from the Obliviators, it was muggles that found them and called the police. Something about muggle explosions? And here you are in your Army uniform.”

Harry chuckled. “It’s a fair cop. Not sure whether that’s going to work a second time, but I’ve been thinking about that rule you people have about apparating to just outside the front door. Right where they’re not going to notice a tripwire. Or have their shields up when some smartarse sprays them with fully-automatic fire from three hundred metres away. Or any one of a dozen other things, like the ways I’ve got to get incendiaries inside their homes, chemical weapons made from household chemicals, and actual experience of fighting their side of an insurgency so I can put us all ahead of where they’ll be when they finally shape up to the point of knowing their arses from the elbows. And all this is assuming that the plan we’ve got for cutting runes into my bullets to go through shield charms doesn’t work out.”

Molly’s grin looked as heathenish as Harry’s felt. “I’m  _ glad _ you’ve grown up a bit from the sweet, polite, shy little boy you were when I first met you. Runes, you say? So not all your magic is gone?”

“Not all, no,” Harry confirmed, “I’ve got a rifle and a few hundred rounds, all with rune charms for total silence. It’s eerie to shoot it. But, yes, all my own work. Jane says I shouldn’t use it more than I absolutely must, or they’ll start with counter-measures that are harder to beat.”

“I dare say they will. Although from the sounds you’ve got plenty of other ideas. I reckon I can throw a few notions of my own into the pot, I used to get good marks in poisons from old Sluggy, may he rest in peace. Which reminds me,” she said, turning to Jane, “I got a lead on where Snape’s hiding.”

“Good. What have you learned, and how reliable is the information?”

“Very reliable, one of the families in here got fingered for being resistance - they weren’t, but probably will be now - and their eldest worked under a Death Eater at the Ministry. Who they overheard saying Snape had a bolthole in the, and they quoted the exact words, ‘muggle shithole rookery he grew up in.’ Which is why I want to know how much Corporal Henry here remembers of being Harry Potter, because the other thing I know about the Severus  _ fucking _ Snape as got my boys thrown in Azkaban is that he knew Harry’s mother before Hogwarts, which ought to tell us which town that particular shithole rookery is  _ in _ .”

“Cokeworth. In Staffordshire,” Harry said. “I remember Aunt Petunia, all right, and how she liked to crack on she was posh. I laughed like a fucking  _ drain _ the day I found out she was from some northern mill-town.”

“How hard is it to hire a private detective?” Molly asked.

“Not hard,” Harry said, “but they might do something daft like knock on his door to confirm he’s there, or give themselves away some other way. Thing is, while he might be looking after his personal security  _ now _ , he probably hasn’t always. So we get in the reference section of the local library and go through old electoral registers for every house that was occupied by a family named Snape up until he turned eighteen, late seventies some time if he’s of an age with my mum. Cokeworth’s not a big place, we could probably do a drive-by recce of every address on the register in under an hour. There won’t be many, Snape’s not a common name. After that it’s just surveillance, and I’ve got elves on the strength. They can get in and out with no bugger the wiser and tell us  _ exactly _ where he lives. Get  _ us _ in, too, even if he’s got it magically protected.” Harry had heard some nightmarish tales about how easy it was to find people from the tiniest scraps of information. Most of the soldiers who’d sat through the same briefings and lectures on personal security assumed they were horror stories to scare them straight, but when Harry had mentioned it to Richard he’d confirmed that yes, private detectives could find out a great deal starting from very little, he’d seen them do it.

Molly looked over at Jane for confirmation. After a moment of consideration, she said, “I would defer to Harry. He has lived longer in the muggle world than either of us, with a fully-established identity and greater breadth of experience than many if not most. Snape is a high-value target and a greater threat than most Death Eaters to the plan we have been discussing. While his muggle knowledge is less current than even my own, he has less imperative to remain stealthy in the muggle world and can therefore use legilimency and mind-altering magic freely in support of his goals.”

“The current plan isn’t the only one he’s a threat to, now, is it?” Molly said, a crafty grin spreading across her face, “there’s also the plan you’ve been trying to distract me from asking about. I’m pretty sure Albus’s plan didn’t include evacuating civilians at all, he was never the sort to give a monkey’s about the little people. Excepting maybe in the abstract, or when he got his nose rubbed in it like we kept trying to do after Claig Castle. I distinctly recall you giving him what-for over  _ that _ , back before that  _ bitch _ took all the spitfire out of you. No, I reckon Albus has got some wing-and-a-prayer scheme for time travel that he’s set you on. You think it might work?”

Harry couldn’t help but chuckle. Yeah, Molly Fucking Weasley was  _ dangerous _ . “No comment,” he said before Jane could say anything, “but for my own personal entertainment, what clues did you put together to get  _ that _ conclusion?”

Molly shrugged. “It was at poor Sirius Black’s wake that poor Remus organised, may both those poor boys rest in peace. Albus reminisced about you two using a time turner to rescue Sirius when you were nothing but children, like he didn’t have the political clout back then to shove the whole thing before the Wizengamot for the full-dress trial that he should’ve seen to in the  _ first place, _ if he hadn’t been too busy swearing up one side and down the other that Snape was on the side of the angels _ - _ but I’m rambling. Hunting and cheese-making don’t keep me  _ nearly _ busy enough not to sit around getting mardy about the mistakes everyone made, my own not the least of them, but sometimes when I think about how Albus sat around doing  _ bugger all _ when he could have made it quite clear he’d act if a line was crossed? It makes me think I should take up necromancy just so’s I could call up his shade and give him a piece of my mind.”

“I’m told he kept me out of Azkaban,” Harry offered, “so there’s  _ that _ .”

“And well done it was too. Trouble is, it was the  _ only time _ he kept anyone out of prison. Sirius Black, Hagrid, Sturgis Podmore, my boys Fred and George, there are others that I don’t think you ever met. Carted off to the Dementors and not so much as a peep out of the great Dumbledore. Alastor Moody had the right idea, fought until he dropped and carried a potion-bomb to take the last few with him. Would’ve been Augusta Longbottom too, but they didn’t send nearly as many after her and she fought her way clear and went on the run. Foolish of them, after the trouble they had with Moody, to think his ex-girlfriend would be any easier a bargain. No notion where her and her Neville, who was in Gryffindor with you two, ended up. Gone muggle or left the country, and I couldn’t begin to guess which for all I wish them the best. Jane here, if she hadn’t emigrated just weeks before it all went sour, I dare say she’d have seen the inside of Azkaban. Albus was powerful enough he could set the whole Ministry at defiance if he’d just roused himself. Sometimes I’m apt to think that that Skeeter bitch was telling the truth in that book she wrote about him, and it was all the lies and guilt had built up in him to the point he couldn’t do  _ anything _ .”

Harry had no idea what book Molly was talking about, but made a note to ask Jane if she had a copy. If they made it back into the past, Dumbledore was going to be  _ important _ .

Jane said, “I was able to verify, from independent sources, that much of what Skeeter wrote as at least circumstantially true. Aberforth Dumbledore confirmed some of the more damning passages regarding his brother’s association with Gellert Grindelwald. I speculate that the disastrous outcome of that first venture into radical politics and revolutionary planning left Albus Dumbledore fearful that all insurgencies would inevitably descend into atrocity.”

“You don’t agree?” Molly asked over the rim of her tea-mug.

“I do not. There are numerous historical counter-examples which Dumbledore ignored. I do not know whether that was because he dismissed muggle history as irrelevant or because he preferred to take counsel of his fears. Whatever his reasoning, it seems likely that Gellert Grindelwald had what would nowadays be called antisocial personality disorder. If so, it would be a much more strongly causative factor in his subsequent criminal behaviour and extremist politics, quite apart from the pre-existing political and material factors that led to his message being accepted by large enough numbers to bring about open magical warfare.”

Molly put down her mug. “You’re saying Grindelwald was a wrong ‘un from the start, and magical Europe was ready for a scrap no matter who turned up to lead it? Shan’t disagree. We got off the point  _ again _ . Albus told the story about you two and the time turner, which put it in my head. He must’ve forgotten he’d mentioned it when he told me about you being ‘uniquely qualified’ for the mission he’d given you. Being too clever by half as usual, thinking we’d all assume it was because you’ve got ice-water in your veins these days. Except that ain’t unique to you, now, is it? Between them that want revenge like the Tonks ladies, and those as are naturally cool under fire like young Mr. Wood, we’ve got plenty who’ll see a thing done and not count the cost nor flinch from doing the needful no matter how distasteful. The only thing that’s really unique to you is you having experience with time magic. So I suspected, and then I mentioned about having time over again and bless you Harry, you  _ flinched _ . Tell me, is the date you’re waiting for one of the solstices?”

Jane got the blank look on her face that Harry recognised as her trying to tally up the logical pros and cons, and rather than pass up a potential resource like Molly, said, “It is, as it happens. How much did Dumbledore tell you about the spell?”

Molly waved off the question, “Not a thing, dear. Doing a working like that, the winter solstice is about the only time you can. The bottom of the wheel of the year, a new beginning, looking forward and back all at once, it’s all first-principles stuff. I may have grown up to be a housewife and a kitchen witch, but that didn’t make me forget all my scholarship. Nor rule out keeping my theory up to scratch to fill the long winter evenings. I doubt I could craft the magic you’ll be using, but I reckon I could follow along if you didn’t mind me moving my lips while I read.” She grinned at him and took a bite of her scone.

Harry chuckled at the self-deprecating humour. “Jane, just how many can we fit in the circle? You were getting on with including the elves.”

“Molly joining us will make it simpler.”

“Five for a new beginning?” Molly suggested.

“Just so. Better than seven for raw power, although I would want to confirm that with finite arithmancy before ruling out recruiting two more travellers.”

“That’d be difficult, with everyone being frightened of time travel,” Harry said, wondering if that fear was as widespread as Jane had suggested. Molly hadn’t batted an eye, after all.

“It will at that,” Molly agreed, “the laws against it were passed for horrifyingly good reason back when I was a girl. For now let’s just say I had my doubts until I got the measure of you, young man, and deduced that you’d be going back. Albus was right about you being central to everything, people  _ cared _ about you and the heart went out of a lot of folk when you vanished. You can explain the plan for how we’re going to get away with it later, of course.”

“I’m assured we’ll be undetectable,” Harry said, “we’re not going by the well-known method. Moving our minds back into our younger selves, apparently.”

She took a moment over that, tapping a finger on her chin. When she’d thought it through, she said, “Well, then, all the better that I’m a part of it. If you’re going back far enough to make a difference, you’ll both be children, or look it at any rate. Best to have someone along who’ll still look like an adult.”

“Hah, yes,” Harry agreed, “I’d been wracking my brains over ways around that particular problem. Jane’s a bit stymied with predicting how the adults will react, what with the lack of empathy.” Harry was also privately worried about her psychological state once she was back in time. Nothing specific, but living a couple of years without emotions, fighting a  _ nasty  _ guerilla war and then time-travelling to suddenly get all those feelings back? Harry couldn’t see that it’d do her any good at all. He was fairly sure he’d be due some time with his underpants on his head and a pencil in each nostril  _ without  _ having endured the same level of shit Jane had.

“I was counting on your considerable improvisational skills, Harry,” Jane said, “which may sound like sarcastic humour but is in fact quite serious. You have survived several situations that ought to have killed you by quick thinking and decisive action under pressure.”

Molly waved her wand to send the plates and mugs off to the sink to wash themselves and stood up. “Well, with all that settled at least as far as knowing we have to make plans, shall we get back to caring for the wounded, looking to my supplies for these houses, and planning the murder of Severus Snape?”

**Spinner’s End, Cokeworth, Staffordshire, 18 July 2004**

Severus Snape, current head of the Department of Magical Education - a job he had on the strength of being the only Death Eater with actual teaching experience - was in the habit of not opening his eyes when he awoke. Growing up as he had, habits of caution like that went back further than he could clearly remember.

What he did not expect was for the choice to be taken away from him as an awakening charm surged along his nerves and wrenched him from hard-won, dreamless sleep to wide-eyed, panting alertness.

There was something  _ over _ his eyes, though. Cloth of some sort. He tried to raise his arms to rip it away, and discovered he was bound. The familiar shape of his mattress beneath him, but some sort of hard shell that pinned him in place. Held him, in fact, exactly in the position he’d been sleeping in.

A voice, that disagreeable Granger bint, the one so many of his compatriots were terrified of to the point of there being a ten thousand galleon bounty on her head, was the first thing he heard. “He has countermeasures against both Veritaserum and Unctuous Unction. The shriving rite to purge him of those will require a full lunar month.”

“We can’t keep him that long, dear,”  _ that _ was Molly Weasley. The one the DMLE called Bloody Molly. She was  _ thought _ to have fled wizarding Britain entirely, nothing had been heard from her for  _ months _ . That she was back was concerning, not that Snape thought he’d have a chance to report. Hearing  _ her _ voice told him that the most he could hope for at this point was facing his death with dignity unless - yes. If they let him talk, he might be able to make a deal. The papers in his safe might well buy his life, convince them he’d turned his coat a third time. Or, rather, if he played his cards right,  _ hadn’t _ turned it a second time when Dumbledore had pinned his hopes on a fool’s dream of a prophesied saviour. He had no other hope of survival: he’d taken care to ensure  _ nobody _ knew the exact address of this particular bolthole.

“Sure about that?” A voice Snape didn’t know. Male, adult, home counties accent, lower-class. “Keep him sedated, or similar?”

“That would be incompatible with the shriving. The subject must be awake to endure the fasting.” Granger was correct. Insufferable though she was, what she knew she knew well and applied properly. It was a loss to magic that she’d been born a mudblood and thereby unacceptable to magical society as it was rather than as Snape wished it might be. Forlornly, because the resistance to the Dark Lord was  _ doomed _ .

“Lieutenant SAH!” the voice of a house elf. “All of the enemy’s papers and parchments, sah!” Snape hoped against hope that they hadn’t got into his safe. He’d charmed it heavily against wizards getting in, but he had no idea what elves were capable of. The oddly-forceful elf voice went on, “These ones in particular seem important, Lieutenant sah! Private Oshin found an iron box with bad magic. Fortunately the Private was able to rip the door off.” Snape’s heart clenched tight in fear. The one bargaining chip he had, spent before he even  _ awoke _ . 

“Ah, so that was what that noise was.” Definite amusement in the male voice. Male voice with a muggle military rank. In command of at least one soldier who knew how to force a safe door. Had the Order of the Phoenix broken the Statute? Even the Dark Lord thought it far too early to start in on the muggles: until the magical world was united under him, he said, the Statute was to be respected. If the Order had convinced the muggles to send in their troops, that would bring in the ICW, and everything was going to go to  _ shit _ .

“Do not touch!” Granger again, sounding like she was snapping out a warning, “Snape was noted for his skill with poisons. There are several contact poisons that he could have applied.”

Snape reflected, ruefully, that Granger was ahead of him on that score. He really should have considered that. He prided himself on being more open to rational thought than most wizards. As a salve to his pride, he reflected that Granger, these days, had nothing  _ but _ . Lestrange had done worse than she knew when she branched out into emotional torture and unwittingly used it to remove all of Granger’s self-imposed limits.

He was surprised to suddenly get his vision back, and noted that Granger had used a rune-cloth over his face. An older method of diagnosing poisonings, but one that with the appropriate charms in support could also reveal beneficial potions in the subject’s system. Who would have thought, he reflected ruefully, that when he had damned her for a know-it-all in her third year she would take it as a  _ challenge _ ?

Her method of immobilising him, he could see, was actually innovative. She’d transfigured his bedlinens and blankets into some sort of hard muggle plastic and shaped them to fit him perfectly. Down to and including individual fingers, which even ruled out his limited repertoire of gesture-based wandless magic. Wandless transfiguration-by-touch was a knack he’d never mastered, for all he’d marvelled at Lily’s instinctive ability with it as a child. The only magics he could do by silent will alone were legilimency and some trifling party-trick spells. Molly Weasley had her wand trained between his eyes: if he spoke any incantation he was a dead man. 

It was when Granger moved aside to let him see the third of his captors -  _ how the bloody hell had they got in? -  _ that he got his deepest shock of the morning. “Potter!” he exclaimed.

“Someone else who recognises me that I can’t remember,” Potter said, a sour tone in his voice. “For some reason, though, the sound of your voice is ringing a bell. A rather nasty one.” 

“You lost the memory of my work as a spy for Dumbledore,” Snape said, forcing himself to adopt a reasonable, conciliatory tone, “if he ever told you in the first place. I played the role of villain well enough that you doubtless have subconscious bad memories of me.”

Potter shrugged. “Really don’t need ‘em. You’re enemy personnel, and everyone seems to agree that we can’t take you prisoner. War criminal, too, since you carried on warlike operations during a time of armistice, what with your efforts to get our side thrown in Azkaban. Maybe you were Dumbledore’s spy, maybe you weren’t, but he’s dead and can’t vouch for you. Far as we know, you never turned your coat at all. You should probably keep mum about it if you did, because otherwise it looks like you’ve turned your coat  _ twice _ . Not a good look, that.”

Granger looked up from where she was speed-reading his paperwork. “This is a file of evidence that would tend to incriminate one of my best sources within the Ministry. Snape’s death would hamper that investigation and preserve my source’s value. As well as permitting him to continue his acts of sabotage.”

“I found him, yes,” Snape agreed, knowing immediately who he’d been talking about. He had a case that was almost good enough to have the boy brought in for interrogation, and had been waiting for more evidence and the most politically opportune moment, “but I haven’t told anyone. But if  _ I’ve _ found him, someone else will also. I can help extract him -”

“He would refuse,” Granger said, “he gave specific advance directives that he was not to be rescued if it appeared he was about to be compromised or captured. He intends to expend his life to do as much damage to the enemy as possible.”

A chill ran through Snape. Before it had all fallen apart, before Potter had been neutralised and Dumbledore had forsaken all reason, Snape had thought the cause to be one worth his life, at need. It had taken time for him to wake up from that foolishness, but wake up he had. First by playing double agent in the opposite direction - without telling anyone, it being death to admit anything - and finally by taking Dumbledore off the board. The Dark Lord had hoped to demoralise the Order of the Phoenix. It had worked for most of them - some even took the offered amnesty like utter fools - but for the hard core all it had done was unleash them: Dumbledore turned out to have been the main civilising influence. It was just Snape’s bad luck that Percy Fucking Weasley would turn out to be part of that hard core. Still, he had to at least  _ try _ . “He could be persuaded - Molly! Granger’s source is your son, Percy. Do you not want to grant him a chance of survival?”

Molly Weasely’s tone was wintry. “I have no son by that name. Not since Claig Castle, and his part in what we found there. Miss Granger’s spy can take his chances the same as the rest of us. If you’ve really told no-one, I don’t doubt someone can warn him, for whatever good it’ll do.”

“Snape is uncommonly rational by wizard standards. I judge it unlikely that there are senior enemy personnel capable of getting as far as he has in detecting Percival’s espionage. It is wholly improbable if not impossible that the enemy have anyone who can get beyond the suggestive, circumstantial case that Snape has built.” Snape’s heart sank as Granger’s dull, emotionless tones pronounced his death sentence.

He sought out Potter’s eyes, hoping against hope that he could get into the man’s mind via legilimency and do something,  _ anything _ . He wasn’t strong in the art without a wand, his command of the mind arts was heavily skewed to the defensive, but - 

Potter’s mind was like a cold, foggy morning. Nothing visible, no feeling, no thoughts, no murmuring chatter of internal monologue. His surprise froze him for only the most fleeting moment, but it was enough for his view of Potter’s eyes -  _ so like Lily’s - _ to be obstructed by the ugly, black maw of a muggle gun.

“That was  _ rude, _ ” Potter said, with no more emotion in his voice than if he’d been remarking on the weather, “does anyone else want to do the honours? Or have a reason for leaving him alive?”

“As an occlumens he may be resistant to obliviation,” Granger supplied. 

Snape had not, in fact, carried his study of the art that far - false-mind techniques were hard to master and  _ vital _ to his continued survival, so he had focussed there - but there was no way any of these would believe him. He felt the warmth as his bladder cut loose, adding indignity to helplessness. He began to struggle, hoping against hope that there was some weakness in Granger’s work. He almost certainly couldn’t fight his way free, but he could at least die  _ fighting _ .

“We’ve left enough traces here that only fire’ll cover our tracks,” Weasley added, sounding indifferent to Snape’s increasingly desperate thrashing in his bonds, “You’ve as much reason as I have to put him down, Harry, but I’ll do it if need be. Or we could just set fire to the place and leave him to burn? He deserves it.”

“That’s three votes of three, then,” Potter said.

The thought of dying bound and helpless in a fire  _ horrified _ him, and he had no doubt that Molly Weasley would relish it and Granger would only care for the practicalities. That left Potter as the only one who might grant him grace. He needed no great effort to scream his fear at the man. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR THEN POTTER? DO -”

He didn’t hear the single shot to the face that killed him instantly.

Nor Granger’s spell of exorcism that laid his ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> (Note I forgot from the last chapter) West Midlands accent: there are actually several distinct ones, but they form an audibly-related group. Julie Walters and Mark Williams, who played Molly and Arthur, are from that part of the world, and used their native accents in the movies. (Toned down a bit so nobody demanded subtitles, mind.)
> 
> Writing Molly Weasley is exhausting. Like many ladies Of A Certain Age, she can talk for England. She’s most of the reason that what was chapter 6 in my notes is chapters 6 and 7 as-written. 
> 
> You really could get discreet RF bugs from Argos, a chain of catalogue stores that operates in the UK and Ireland. Still can: the actual working parts of a basic baby monitor are tiny and easily extracted. 
> 
> Hexes and Howlers are self-explanatory. Hatpins, however: ladies shanking importunate males with their hatpins was a ‘social problem’ of the 19th century that should never have gone away. Three inches of steel to the meat of the thigh discourages the blighters from giving the rest of us a bad name.
> 
> A kitchen witch in the modern sense is a good-luck effigy of a witch in your kitchen. The tradition survives in parts of Germany and Scandinavia, but died out in England some time after it was last documented in the 16th century. 
> 
> Since Shakespeare has come up, feel free to take any opinions you may have that he couldn’t have written all the stuff credited to him and shove ‘em where the sun don’t shine. 
> 
> Cottage loaves are one of those excellent things you can hardly ever find any more - they were all but vanished when I was a lad - because they’re hard to make a profit off of. They’re also near impossible to slice for sandwich makings. Even your niche little traditional bakeries only do a few each day so you’ve got to get in early for them. 
> 
> Astute readers will have noticed my sly little dig at the whole ‘memory charm a couple to believe they have no daughter and want to emigrate’ thing. If Hermione really did that, her parents would still have been in the UK at the end of Deathly Hallows while the utter bureaucratic bugger-up was being processed. Assuming they didn’t end up in secure psychiatric care.
> 
> The witch-hunts described by Binns in the books bear no resemblance to the ones that actually happened. In reality, JKR’s ‘print the legend’ approach to history. In the Potterverse it’s anti-muggle propaganda to keep the magical populace scared, and like all good propaganda starts from the truth and uses it as a foundation.
> 
> The anti-emigration measures have tragic historical precedent (minus the child-theft: the purebloods are a different sort of bigot). Naturally, the motive for Nazi Germany doing it that way - their appalling currency exchange problems - was rather different. That’s on top of peoples’ natural reluctance to up sticks and emigrate because they didn’t think it could get that bad. “The pessimists went to New York and Palestine. The optimists went to Auschwitz.”
> 
> Claig Castle is a ruin on an uninhabited island between the Hebrides and the coast of Scotland. Only the ground floor of one structure remains: there is some documentary evidence that Clan MacDonald used it to hold prisoners. 
> 
> “Special Branch” - not the name they go by nowadays, “Counter Terrorism Command” is the current re-brand. Originally founded in Ireland to suppress the independence movement, they’re viewed as either heroic fighters in the shadows against the insidious terrorist threat or the UK’s Gestapo.
> 
> I’ve placed Cokeworth roughly where Leek is in our world, in the northern tip of Staffordshire. It’s only the North by the standards of a home counties boy like Harry. North Midlands would be more accurate.
> 
> Electoral registration is compulsory in the UK. Local government send out regular mailings asking for updates to their records, and send people out to canvass at least a couple of wards a year in person. The public record of the register is one tool in the private inquiry agent’s arsenal, and some of them really are scary good. Client confidentiality forbids me sharing details, you’ll have to take my word for it. 
> 
> If you get the underpants and pencils reference, you’ll have noticed Harry is actually being mildly optimistic about his mental health. If you didn’t get it, go watch Blackadder Goes Forth, now. And watch Blackadder, Blackadder II and Blackadder The Third while you’re about it. Thank me later.
> 
> Fic recommendation: The Lioness by Aya_Diefair, on AO3 and FFN alike. Another author’s stab at the character Molly should have been but wasn’t.


	8. Prepared Positions

DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter canon can be controlled. You just disconnect it.

* * *

_ “The current plan isn’t the only one he’s a threat to, now, is it?” Molly said, a crafty grin spreading across her face, “there’s also the plan you’ve been distracting me from. I’m pretty sure Albus’s plan didn’t include evacuating civilians at all, he was never the sort to give a monkey’s about the little people. Excepting maybe in the abstract, or when he got his nose rubbed in it like we kept trying to do after Claig Castle. I distinctly recall you giving him what-for over that, back before that bitch took all the spitfire out of you. No, I reckon Albus has got some wing-and-a-prayer scheme for time travel that he’s set you on. You think it might work?” _

-oOo-

**Chapter 8**

**Earlswood, West Midlands, 24 July 2004**

Harry had been a bit surprised to learn that the ‘kitchen’ that was the foundation of Molly’s power was actually in a twin-axle caravan on a small Romani site a little way south of Solihull, just off the M42. He’d assumed that a kitchen had to be in a built house. Apparently a caravan parked in a herb garden was enough.

That she’d chosen this place to live in wasn’t altogether surprising, though. If you wanted to surround yourself with people who were really, really careful about talking to outsiders in general and the authorities in particular, the travelling communities were a good place to start looking. The sheer quantity of shit they got off just about everyone - even Vernon wasn’t much out of the norm when ranting about ‘bloody Pikeys’ - gave them plenty of motive.

As well as the natural closed ranks of people who had to endure constant racist bollocks, they offered another advantage for a witch who needed to lay low. Reading between the lines of the lengthy account Molly’d given of the local family relationships and dramas, they were people out on the frayed edges of modern life. As such, they were exactly the sort of people who’d be glad to have a witch about the place, no questions asked. Even if they couldn’t come straight out and talk plainly about what she was, they’d see to it that she felt welcome. 

And protected: when Harry and Jane had got out of the car - Jane couldn’t apparate them somewhere she hadn’t been, so they’d left the elves on stag and driven - they’d been asked their business almost immediately. And then been watched the whole way to Molly’s caravan by people who looked like they’d be only too glad to re-enact one or two key scenes from  _ Snatch _ if Molly asked it of them. The kids Molly had asked to keep an eye on the car had all but saluted before double-timing off to see to it.

Naturally, the inside of Molly’s twin-axle caravan was bigger than the outside, albeit not so much that you’d spot it if you weren’t paying attention. Molly had nevertheless managed to fit a wood-fired cast-iron cooking stove and better furniture than the usual built-in stuff you usually saw in caravans: Harry suspected that this particular model had never been towed anywhere, just magicked from place to place. Certainly your normal family car wouldn’t have a hope of shifting it.

Every wall and window was festooned with little bits of arts-and-crafts made with twigs and yarn and scraps of cloth embroidered with runes. Harry guessed they were all the genuine article rather than tat from new-age shops, and meant to protect the place and conceal it from magical surveillance. Everywhere that wasn’t decorated with that sort of thing was festooned with bunches of drying herbs, racked and stacked with jars of pickled and preserved things, hung with cauldrons and pots and otherwise cluttered with witchy stuff. Either the stereotype of the country witch had some evidence on its side, or Molly had found out about it and leaned into it  _ hard _ .

The only exception to the olde-worlde theme was the telly and DVD player mounted where it could be seen from the curtained-off bed. Harry wasn’t rude enough to have a nosy at the stack of obviously-knock-off DVDs to see what her taste in movies was.

Molly being Molly, nothing got discussed until they were all on the outside of a hearty plate of faggots in onion gravy - mushroom dumplings for Jane - with marrowfat peas and mashed spud, with Summer Pudding to follow.

Once they were finished, the dishes levitated away to wash themselves, and tea in front of all three of them, Molly said, “So, young Katie tells me that as of yesterday they’ve got ten families out of the country. France to start with, and Madame Delacour has her people finding them places to move on to from there.”

“Good,” Harry said, “Are we going to be needed for escorting people to the ports and stations and such?” Harry was willing, although he was a little shy of meeting members of the magical public. Molly had figured out who he was all too easily.

“Katie says there are some groups that are going to need to travel in a rented minibus,” Katie was part of the group Molly had called together to help organise the evacuations, introduced as having been on the same Quidditch team as three of her sons. Harry understood that to mean that she featured in his own missing memories and he should be careful, “do you think you can get one of those?” 

Harry nodded, mentally noting that he’d have to chase up the coloured contacts and take a few other measures to improve his disguise if he was going to be spending more time around magicals, especially ones who’d known him before. Katie only hadn’t recognised him the way Molly had because the meeting was short enough that Jane transfiguring his eyes would last. He’d also got his hair clipped suede-head to remove another point of description, and started growing a moustache. “Shouldn’t be a problem, just a question of booking in advance and paying. Minicab firms don’t have anything big enough?”

“Some do, I shouldn’t wonder, but it’s not size that’s the problem. Katie says that there have been some funny looks from the drivers they’ve been hiring. Even with the foot-in-both-worlds halfbloods, she says, and there are some families that really need their contact with muggles kept to a minimum because Those People are watching out for the use of memory charms. They’ll have to be escorted on to the train or boat they’re taking - we’re talking about people who we  _ can’t _ send by air - and met at the far end by people who can shepherd them.”

Harry snorted his amusement. He’d spent a while at the safe house after that first chat with Molly. In obvious muggle attire, the reactions to him had ranged from fearful through condescending to, in the worst cases, daft as a box of frogs. They’d need shepherding, all right. Some of them would attract less attention sedated and wheeled onto the train or boat with a sack truck. “Noticed some handy-looking lads on the way in, here. Any chance of recruiting them to help? Strikes me they’d keep their mouths shut if it was  _ you _ doing the telling, no matter how strange things got.”

Molly chuckled. “Oh, you’d want the girls for that sort of thing, at least among the families that are here right this minute. The boys have good hearts, all of them, and smart as you could ask for. Trouble is, they’re proud of how subtle they ain’t.”

Harry grinned back. “Known a few lads like that in my time. Catch me on the wrong day, I’m one myself.”

“I don’t doubt it, and I dare say you’d get on famously,” Molly went on, “but involving them in witch business is a line I don’t care to cross. Not just because of the whole Secrecy thing - the travelling folks have always been a bit of a grey area on that front, even more than most country folk - but I’ve an obligation to my neighbours. Keep them safe if I can, and  _ surely _ not bring trouble to their door.”

“Fair enough,” Harry said, “and now we’ve got the Order of the Phoenix alongside the idea of burner phones we can organise a lot faster.” Some of them had been more than slightly weird about the idea of telephones full stop, never mind the mobile ones, but between Harry and the others with at least a foot in the muggle world they’d all at least learned to answer calls and read texts.

“Which I suppose means we’re on to the Other Thing,” Molly said, pronouncing the capitals. That was at Harry’s insistence: the exercise Jane had asked him to do on possible uses of the Taboo Curse had got him good and paranoid about what could and could not be spoken aloud, and while Jane and the Elves were fine with ‘Operation Gallifrey’ Molly had drawn a line.

“I have reworked the ritual for five participants,” Jane said, sliding a manila folder across the table to Molly, “with options for myself as sole caster and for you to assist. Please review the script and notes and determine which you prefer.”

“Many wands make light work,” Molly murmured, donning her reading glasses and flipping open the first page, “and I shall let you know whether I can …” She slapped the folder down on the table and jabbed a finger at a particular line of symbols, “Well, I can tell you right off that I can do better than  _ that _ . I dare say I could have done better when you first met me, too, young lady. You’ll need to amend this unless you want to be all but carrying the whole thing by yourself.”

Jane tilted her head. “I acknowledge that while my memories are clear, they are coloured by the emotional prejudices I held at the time they were formed. I assumed that a housewitch would be the same as the housewives I had direct experience of, and I have not directly observed you performing complex or high-energy magic since those days. Please be as objective as you can in assessing your capabilities.”

Molly gave Jane a flat and level look.

Sensing possible friction, Harry put in, “She’s got a point, Molly. We’ve still got our pride, and Jane hasn’t. I reckon it’d be easy to let that pride lead us to mistakes, just like her lack of it makes her blunt at times.”

Molly harrumphed. “You’ve a sensible head on your shoulders, Harry Potter. Jane, I apologise for the tone I was taking. I’ll do my best to measure myself fairly.”

“I have inadvertently given offence,” Jane said, “for which I apologise.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“So,” Harry said when he couldn’t bear it any more, “how much set-up is needed on the day, and how long does the magic take, and how much of it do the elves and I have to be actually in the circle for?” He already knew the rough answers, but if he was going to get a planning session going here he’d need to get Molly briefed quickly.

Jane blinked, with her I-am-calculating face on for a few seconds. “I estimate two hours without assistance. The full ritual should take thirty-one minutes and one second, with the passengers, for want of a better term, joining the circle five minutes and one second before the end. For safety’s sake you and the elves should be ready to step into the circle thirty seconds before that time.”

“And the consequences if any of this is interrupted?”

“Catastrophic, for us and anyone within three hundred paces and a pace, which places minimum safe distance, with a reasonable margin for error, at five hundred metres. I am assuming for safety’s sake that the text means a complete walking pace that returns to the same foot.”

Harry looked at Molly. “And, importantly, the only component we  _ absolutely _ can’t do without, we have to steal from the Ministry and it will tell them what we’re up to. So, it’s got to be done at the absolute last minute. The only advantage we’ve got is the fact that the list of potential sites we can use is in the thousands in the UK alone.”

“Thousands of sites, eh?” Molly mused, lifting her mug and staring into her tea while she thought, “We’ve plenty of choice as to red herrings, then?”

“I thought that, too,” Harry agreed, “We should pick out at least a couple of dummy sites and lay a false trail straight from the scene of our crime to one of them, one we can set an ambush at. Keep them busy trying to gather enough forces to survive apparating in. While they’re busy hammering away at that, I’m not even  _ close _ to exhausting all the booby-traps I know, we sneak off to the real site. We tested Private Oshin, and he can apparate me, being the heaviest of us, the distance we’re talking about, and do it fifteen times before he even starts to feel tired. Elf apparition isn’t detected by the enemy, so they’ll have no idea where we went. Between now and then we need to do as much force reduction and degradation of enemy capabilities as we can, while reserving enough that we can throw an almighty lot of bollocks at them on the day.”

“Diversions,” Molly said, “so that just as they’re picking themselves up after getting mauled by your ambush, they get word of henges lighting up in all the wrong places. If Jane can teach Order members how to open a henge they can make it look like there are rituals being done up and down the country.”

“What do we tell them?” Harry said, at the same time as Jane put in, “They cannot be told -”

Molly waved them both down, “Well of  _ course _ we don’t tell them it’s time travel. The ones that know it’s possible know why it’s illegal, and they  _ will _ refuse to take part and they’ll persuade anyone who’ll listen not to take part either. They’ll be assuming we’re going to do the Mintumble experiment all over again. Whatever she changed in the past, not that we’ll ever know, when she returned it was  _ catastrophic _ . We’re not going to be returning, so all this,” she waved a hand in the air to take in the world in general, “is just going to go  _ poof _ , if I understand Jane correctly. And, touch wood, we’re going to change things so much for the better that nobody’ll know we were ever there. We’re going to need to tell them it’s some big piece of magic that’ll shift the balance in the war, and they’re the diversion. Doesn’t have to be a real piece of magic, just one that’s plausible. Tell them to get those circles open and hold them at all costs. Not run unless it’s truly hopeless, like the Bastard Himself turning up. They don’t have to do anything with the magic, just be as big a distraction as possible for as long as possible, and bleed the blighters. Everyone they put down, or just put in St. Mungo’s for a few hours, is one less that might come chasing after us. Have them start at different times, too. Jane, what’s the smallest number that can open a henge?”

“Larger henges tend to be tourist attractions and as such impractical. Excluding those, to open them well enough to manifest will require three, five, seven or thirteen wands depending on the size of the henge. There are none that can be fully opened to be useful, but as distractions they need not be. There will be a minimum distance from our own site that must be maintained so as to prevent destructive interference. That limits our choices among the sites we can use and -” Jane paused. Frowned briefly. Then, “Before recommending a pattern of sites and optimum team size I must consider the likelihood of an Unspeakable spotting the pattern, even when taken by surprise and under pressure of time. Our own henge will not appear to be open if observed from outside the circle until the last few seconds of the ritual. However, a wide gap in the pattern of decoy sites may prove noticeable to a sufficiently astute enemy.”

“Work on it later,” Harry said, “but don’t let the best be the enemy of the good. Or, maybe, consider a line of sites that passes ours just outside the minimum safe distance. A nice obvious pattern with no holes in it so they don’t consider what  _ other _ patterns were possible.”

Jane nodded.

“We’ve got people in the Ministry too,” Molly went on, “and since this one’s for all the gobstones we should ask for a diversion there. Set for shortly after we leave. At least one big one, since we’ve got a man in there who’s already been nearly caught once and says he don’t mind dying.”

Harry paused a moment. Literally everything Molly Weasley had just set out as her contributions to the plan amounted to sending people, people she’d likely known for years, on suicide missions. And she’d capped it all with a call for her own son to die for the cause. Hadn’t so much as turned a hair while saying it. Harry was  _ bloody _ glad she was on  _ his _ side.

He flipped open his notepad to the blank page with OP GALLIFREY written at the top. “So,” he said, “Proper Planning And Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Working back from the end, we want to be coming  _ out _ of the ministry by oh-nine-hundred at the latest on the day …”

**Waterloo International Railway Station, 3 August 2004**

“Packed with muggles, of course.”

Harry cringed. ‘There’s always one’ was a proverb for a reason. 

Here and how  _ the one _ was Molly’s crotchety old great aunt. It’d been a three hour drive starting at half past three in the fucking morning in Somerset, and the old biddy hadn’t shut her wrinkled old trap  _ once _ . It wasn’t even like she had the excuse of losing her marbles: a hundred and fourteen was old, but well short of ‘declining years’ for a witch. She was just  _ like that _ , and always had been according to Molly.

Molly was on the case, though. “Now, Aunty Muriel, two things. First, remember what I said about not using words from our world? If a spy overhears you, we’re all done for. And the second thing, of course, is that it’s  _ their _ railway station, they’re allowed to pack it if they want to.”

Given Muriel’s admittedly-not-very-thick West Country accent, Harry reckoned they’d get away with ‘muggle’ as old-fashioned dialect unless a Ministry spy was directly listening in. It was the  _ sentiment _ he objected to. She’d already nearly made them late by refusing to pack  _ any _ of the jewelry she insisted on wearing, metal detectors or no metal detectors. Or ‘pestiferous muggle contraptions’ as she called them, to distinguish them from the ‘ramshackle muggle contrivance’ that was the rented minibus Harry had driven her here in. 

Molly was confident they’d get away with a confundus charm on the metal-detector and its operators - too many witches and wizards used that spell to avoid muggles every day for the Ministry to pay much attention to it - but it meant she had to stick to her great-aunt like glue from here on in.

“Couldn’t  _ arrangements _ have been made?”

Harry tried not to let the kids see him rolling his eyes as he chivvied them along, but managed to exchange a knowing look with Muriel’s widowed granddaughter-in-law, who was called Patience and plainly had to exercise it every day.  _ No love lost there _ , Harry thought, while clinging desperately to the thought that he’d personally be rid of the old bat in less than half an hour. 

“No, Aunty Muriel, they couldn’t. The best we could do is come early in the morning when the station’s nearly empty.”

“ _ This _ is nearly empty? There must be a hundred muggles here, at  _ least _ !”

Harry strode ahead to lead the way to the ticket barrier. Much more of this and he’d be in twitching-eyelid territory. Worse luck, he was pretty sure that if he chinned Aunty Muriel people would look at him like  _ he _ was the bad guy.

“Yes, Aunty Muriel, but you’re in London now. There are more people here than in the whole of Somerset, so naturally it’s a little crowded even at its quietest time.” Molly was being the soul of forbearance in not pointing out that there were fifty people at the absolute outside, besides the extended Prewett family. And, rattling around in a couple of acres of station concourse - at least! - they were hardly crowded.

“Well, they could still make better arrangements. And it’s not like I’ve never been in a town before, young Molly-my-girl. I went to Wookey Hole only last year.”

Reaching the barrier, Harry presented the tickets to a woman in Eurostar livery who was visibly trying not to crack up. Aunty Muriel  _ carried _ . “Will it be all right if we go on the platform to see ‘em off?” he asked, adding in a quiet murmur, “Only Aunty Muriel’s a bit of a handful and everyone else is busy with the kids.”

“No, that’s fine, you just need to check in at security,” she said, with her attention on counting the tickets and matching them up to bodies. The charms on the tickets and passports that prompted people not to question anything had proven reliable, but this was Harry’s first time  _ personally _ relying on them so he watched carefully. After only a few moments, she said, “just make sure you’re off the train at least two or three minutes before departure if you’re not travelling. Which is two of you, have I counted that right?”

“You have,” Harry confirmed with a nod, “and thank you.”

“Why does everything have to be so  _ big?  _ I’m sure nothing had to be this big in  _ my _ day, we  _ made do _ , without wasting all this space,” said Muriel as Molly led her past Harry and on to the platform with a hand around her arm and an air that suggested that while she wasn’t  _ actually _ frog-marching her great aunt, frog-marching was definitely an  _ option _ . 

To add insult to injury, the Eurostar lady’s eyes were sparkling and she was  _ actually biting her lip _ .

“Ain’t even seven in the morning yet, and it’s already been a  _ fucking _ long day,” he muttered as he turned away to follow Molly.

**Blackburn, Lancashire, 3 September 2004**

Harry spoke the incantation for the umpteen-thousandth time, and finally all of the practise and effort paid off. He felt warmth flow through his hand and fingers and opened his eyes. There, in the middle of the circle he’d formed with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, was a shimmering blueish-white point. Smoothly and calmly, like Jane’s written instructions said, he swivelled his hand to bring his palm under the spark and opened his fingers.

With an electric crackle, hiss, and hum, the spark dropped into his palm, splashed, and flickered up as a handful of glittering, shivering cold-white flames. Cool and ticklish against the skin of his hand, bright enough to read by in the dark, and would only kindle ordinary fire by his express will.

It had taken over four weeks of daily practise, two hours at a time, and rigid self-discipline not to get discouraged and give up. But now? 

_ Fuck my old boots, I’m doing magic! _

The best part was that he could _feel_ _it_. A tickle in his mind, a dance in his heart, warmth in his fingers and another sense he didn’t have words for, all surging and babbling in time to the dance and flicker of the flames in his hand. They’d taken his ability to use a wand or cauldron from him, the fuckers, but as soon as he’d shown he could work rune-magic, Jane had dug through her personal library for every scrap of literature she had on other traditions of magic, looking for everything that could be done without either. 

She said that she did not know enough to structure a programme of study for him: the teachers at Hogwarts had never explained to her why they taught the spells in the order that they did, if they even knew themselves. 

She recalled that learning new spells became easier with each one she mastered. By fifth year, acquiring a new spell became the work of minutes and all she had to practise was speed, efficiency, points of style and useful variations. That motivated him like nothing else could. If he got one spell, he could get another. If he had two, he’d find it easier to pick up a third. And so on, and so forth.

For now, the next exercise was to hold the flame until doing so required no concentration, was as automatic and heedless as motorway driving. After that it was exercises to cast the spell without speaking the incantation aloud - subvocalization was the first step to truly silent magic, according to Jane. She said casting spells by will alone, eliminating the gesture as well, was likely to take years for any spell ‘of more than trivial power’.

As far as Harry was concerned, the advanced stuff could wait. He was  _ doing magic! _ Master this spell, move on to the next. He’d seen one in the books that threw a bolt of force, aimed with a punch or a spear-thrust. The beginning stages of learning the spell sounded a  _ lot _ like some of the drills he’d done in martial arts, so he reckoned he had a head start on that one. He could pick up a few cheap punching-bags to use as targets.

Even if he never went back in time and got his wand back, Harry could do magic. Being an unorthodox weirdo wizard he could live with: the important thing was that he  _ was _ a wizard again.

_ He’d beaten the fuckers who’d taken it away from him. _

**Brat’s Hill, Cumbria, 22 September 2004**

“Okay, you can come back down, Lance Corporal” Harry said. Lance Corporal Dobby could hear him whisper from anywhere, or so he said. Harry hadn’t found a limit to it yet, although they hadn’t tested it rigorously. Oshin, by contrast, needed him to shout with intent so it was a bellow of “Private Oshin!” to get the second elf down from the other peak that overlooked the stone circle. All he could do was sense a forcefully-expressed call as he lacked Dobby’s ability to hear at a distance. 

All of the dozens of different tribes of elves had their differences like that, they’d told him. That had prompted a debate between the two about how many sorts exactly there were. Harry had been particularly amused to learn that there was an entire sort called Dobbies and a lot of them were  _ named _ Dobby, but Dobby himself was actually a Puck, which Oshin insisted were properly called Robingoodfellows. Dobby said that was another type of elf altogether, there being apparently no limit to Elf Weirdness.

He’d sent them up with the survey staffs and GPS units while he manned the optical level he’d rented. The 1:10,000 OS map was all very well by itself, but it was no substitute for measuring up properly on site. He just wished that somewhere in the massive pile of professional development the Army had given him for free there’d been a basic course on surveying, because figuring this stuff out from first principles and A-level trigonometry, having seen it done exactly once, was painful.

“Next step is photographing everything,” Harry told his troops when they returned, pointing at the holdall full of disposable cameras, “Like we drilled, a picture of every clock direction from all the points fifty metres in every clock direction from this point. Same from both of the spots I picked out for shooting from.”

The pictures would probably not be needed other than to refresh his memory while drawing out the plan on the sketch map he’d made,, although maybe accidentally dropping one somewhere would help sell the ambush, like those ‘accidentally’ lost invasion plans they used to fool the Nazis before D-Day.

The stone circle was a wide ring of knee- to waist-high stones on an east-ish to west-ish saddle ridge between two craggy peaks. Valleys fell away to either side, and there were four other stone circles nearby, arranged in two pairs. The Taboo ambushes - Harry had done three since that first, and the reprisals had kept the refugee teams in brisk business - had been teaching basic tactics to the enemy, not least of which was the value of not dropping yourself blindly right on top of your target. Molly had advised him on apparition and Jane on portkeys, and for complicated magical-theory reasons they were both safest if targeted at relatively level ground.

The ridge between the two peaks was wide, flat, and a little boggy in places, maybe a quarter square kilometre of flattish ground. If the enemy didn’t want a steep climb up or down to get to their target from their arrival point, they’d have to arrive pretty close and in plain view from either or both of the peaks. With the long grass and clumps of heather, stake mines and claymores were going to be easy to hide, and in late December he’d likely have snow on the ground to help with concealment. 

There were a few sheep nearby, and Harry supposed the elves or one of the witches - probably Molly, she’d been a farmer most of her life - would have to do something to get them out of the way on the day. And the whole day before, Harry realised as he tallied up how much wire he’d have to run about the place if he was going to  _ really _ set this place to blow up every possible approach of bad guys - it was a full day’s work, and not a short one. Unless the sheep weren’t left up on the hills in winter? He’d have to ask Molly, or possibly just do another recce the week before d-day.

The important thing, though, was making sure that there was something  _ in _ that circle that would make the enemy head toward it, draw them into a prepared area so he could soften them up with explosives before finishing them off with a hail of magic bullets. Come d-day, he’d have no reason to conserve ammo. Come d-day, he’d have literally every bullet he’d stolen enchanted one way or another, so unless the enemy had  _ really _ got a clue, he’d be able to do quite a lot of damage, too.

What kind of bait would do that, though?  _ That _ bore thinking about.

**Diagon Alley, 25 September 2004**

Diagon Alley was a weird emotional maelstrom for Harry.  _ Something _ about the place filled him with a sense of joyful wonder. Something  _ else _ about the place - possibly the haunted, furtive looks on the faces of most of the shoppers despite it being a fine autumn Saturday - made him feel a hollow, aching sense of loss. And then there was the anger, as here and there some smug-looking twat in a black robe swaggered through like he or she owned the place. 

It didn’t look like a place much worth owning, in Harry’s view. Maybe every third shop was boarded up and plastered with enemy propaganda posters, and Harry was pretty sure only a few of the more recent ones had been emptied by the evacuation teams. Although he  _ was _ basing that guess on only having been asked once for the elves’ help with packing up a shop for export.

Being run by racist lunatics was bad for an economy, who knew?

He shook off the dismal thoughts, and went into the tearoom Jane had told him about. He was not just taking this meeting - despite the risk - because he wanted to recce Diagon Alley as a whole for the sake of the next day’s op. He was taking it because he was the only one who  _ could _ . Jane was ruled out because although she could adopt any physical disguise she liked, she would give herself away as soon as she had to interact with anyone. Molly had ruled  _ herself _ out because she wasn’t sure she would be able to control herself in the presence of the enemy. From the hints she’d dropped here and there about what she’d seen at Claig Castle, Harry didn’t think he blamed her.

He’d downed a dose of Jane’s dwindling stock of polyjuice - the bottleneck in production was the skin of a south african snake, which was a controlled substance under the current Ministry - to take the decidedly hairy risk of joining Percy Weasley for lunch in Diagon Alley. When Weasley had accepted the meeting - they weren’t going to put  _ this  _ request in a dead-drop letter or in writing anywhere for that matter - he’d specified that Jane should come in a female disguise.

So, for the next - he checked his watch - forty-seven minutes, after which he had to be away from here or re-dosed, he was wearing the form Jane had used the first night he met her. Jane herself had not been able to see what was wrong with his performance during the practise session he’d insisted on - had not been able to see the need for a practise session at all, in fact. Molly, for her part, had spent the first ten minutes hooting with laughter and the rest of the hour teaching him to, if not pass, then at least not be horribly implausible as a witch.

He suspected he wasn’t doing well, but hoped he was managing well enough not to be stand-out weird  _ from the outside _ . From the inside it was definitely … odd. Using polyjuice to be other blokes was something Harry could get used to within a few minutes. This was his first time as a woman, not counting practise, and he didn’t think he’d  _ ever _ get quite alongside it. Trying to shove that thought to the back of his mind, he went in.

The tearoom’s interior looked like the kind of place Aunt Petunia would love. Spindly, over-carved furniture, floral prints and chintz everywhere it could be applied and several places it shouldn’t have been, lace doilies edge-to-edge on every flat surface, twee little portraits of jolly-looking animals in human clothing on the walls, and pottery knicknacks so densely arranged everywhere that Harry instinctively pulled his elbows in to avoid knocking anything over. Which told him he’d probably been standing like a man outside.

The proprietress was a tall and spindly-looking witch who looked over from her counter as he came in. She didn’t visibly dislike what she saw, but contrived to imply by twitch of eyebrow and tilt of nose that disapproval was only the tiniest of social miscues away. Gathering his skirts in to thread his way through the close-packed tables - barely a third of which were occupied, mostly with disagreeable-looking old biddies who were trying not to be obvious about measuring up this new witch in their midst - Harry went to the only table with a single man at it.

Said man was a narrow-faced, long-nosed redhead with not-quite jug ears and early-onset male pattern baldness. If they were hoping to make this look like a lunch date, they were going to give Weasley a reputation for punching  _ well  _ above his weight. Sitting down and remembering to keep his knees together - a lot more comfortable as a girl, for all that Weasley’s old-fashioned manners in rising to greet him and pulling out a chair for him had done his head in a bit - Harry said, “I hope the cakes here are good, Percy, because the decor looks like my aunt had a hand in it. And she was frankly  _ insane _ .” 

Of an instant, Harry could  _ feel _ the eyes of the old biddies swivelling to bore into him: he hadn’t  _ quite _ used his NCO voice, but he’d  _ definitely _ spoken louder than a woman would in his place. He’d read a phrase once, ‘the imp of the perverse’ and in that moment he knew  _ exactly _ what it meant. It was an  _ effort _ to keep his mouth closed around the malevolent grin that bubbled up from inside him.  _ You ain’t seen nothing yet, you lot of old trouts _ .  _ Let’s see how you handle the traditional soldier’s drag act _ .

Weasley snorted his amusement out loud, but there was a sudden air of nervousness in his eyes. “They have both sweet and savoury  _ petits fours _ , and I’ve yet to be disappointed,” he said, “Which would you prefer?”

“I think -  _ savoury _ ,” Harry said, putting some salacious performance into the word, “unless they do something  _ spicy _ ?”

Behind Harry, a dozen pairs of nostrils discreetly flared.

While Weasley was at the counter ordering a stand of savouries and a pot of tea for them both, Harry got a brass three-wise-monkeys figurine out of his handbag. Jane had assured him that once activated it would keep any conversation at the table entirely private. He’d only just set it down next to the table centrepiece - a pottery figurine of a peasant girl with a bovine expression on her face - when one of the biddies came over. 

“Are you  _ sure _ you’re in the right place, dear? It doesn’t seem right for  _ your sort, _ ” she said, with a little sniff after she’d barbed those last two words like the venomous serpent she was.

“I  _ was _ invited,” Harry said, letting his smile show just a hint of teeth, and wondering just what  _ sort _ he was that was unwelcome. It was a three-way toss-up between being black, young, and ‘not a nasty small-minded old prune’. “And besides,  _ my sort _ goes where she pleases.” He gave a dismissive flick of the wrist that he could play off if what he was trying didn’t work - but it did.  _ Subvocalised incantation for the win. _ Flames kindled in his palm and danced a moment. Carefully not looking - it would spoil the effect - he snapped his hand shut to end the spell before his attention wavered and he set his lavender kidskin gloves on fire.

Old Biddy’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “Well, I  _ neve _ r _ , _ ” she exclaimed, and flounced off back to her table. Molly had told him that wandless magic was, among British wizards and witches, widely thought to be incredibly difficult and only possible for the powerful. She admitted she’d thought as much for a long time, until she’d had her horizons forcibly expanded by the total collapse of her old life and learned that it was merely foreign and a skill like any other.

He heard the word  _ veela _ stand out from among the murmur of gossip and wondered briefly what it meant as Weasley came and sat back down. Harry was fortunate to have his attention on the other man taking his seat when a cake-stand and tea-service appeared from thin air on the table. If he’d startled,  _ that _ would’ve been a dead giveaway.

Weasley was about to speak, so Harry held up a finger and with the other hand stroked each monkey’s head in turn, murmuring the activation phrase. The monkeys began shifting and lashing their little brass tails, so he knew it was working. “Okay, go on,” he said.

“I, ah, that is - you’re not quite how I expected you to be.”

Harry raised an eyebrow and tilted his head. “More  _ character _ than you were expecting?”

“That’s one way to put it, certainly.”

Harry allowed himself a chuckle, “That was the problem. Doesn’t matter what disguise you put her in, Jane’s recognisably Jane, so she sent me with the message. I can act at least  _ something _ like whoever I’m disguised as.”

Weasley harrumphed his embarrassment, “Yes, well, that worked out better than expected. You see, there’s pressure at the Ministry that wizards should marry, especially us purebloods, they’re putting out pamphlets saying it’s our duty to get the population up. There’s  _ also _ talk of cracking down on the homosexuals, too, and a wizard who’s still a bachelor at thirty attracts  _ gossip _ , and I’m not far off that. I’ve been very publicly answering lonely hearts notices in the Prophet, much though I dislike the idea of giving a hostage to fortune. I suspect you’ve provoked quite the groundswell of gossip about my romantic exploits, so thank you for that. I dare say the other chaps in the office will be asking me for my secret if that bit about you being a veela gets around.”

“If I’d known that, I’d have come in the form of a more plausible date,” Harry said, “I’m pretty sure that witches that look like  _ this _ don’t feature in the lonely hearts column.” He decided he didn’t care to comment on the idea of open institutional homophobia still being around in the 21st century, even the Army was relaxed about that these days, and wasn’t going to give himself away by asking what a ‘veela’ was and revealing how little of the magical world he really knew. 

“Ah. I  _ was _ wondering. That veela rumour will be a reasonable excuse for me not seeking a second date, I suppose. Officially the Ministry regards veela and part-veela as just as good as any other witch - something to do with preserving good relations with the few nations still willing to deal with us - but unofficially there’s a great deal of prejudice. Nobody will blame me for declining to pursue an interest in someone I learned was other than entirely human.  _ Is _ the woman you’re impersonating a veela? Or just a regular witch?”

“I’ve no idea, Jane found her. And before you ask, I’m a bloke under this.” He discreetly checked his watch, an Elizabeth Duke ladies’ model that Molly assured him was the sort of gaudy-shiny that a lot of witches favoured. Molly was betting that most witches couldn’t tell it from the real thing, either. Which wasn’t important: the fact that he had thirty-nine minutes before he had to re-dose was the thing he had to keep his eye on. He needed to crack on. “Getting back to the point of this meeting, there’s two parts to the message. First is that you were nearly caught. We destroyed the file Snape had on you -”

“He’s officially listed as missing by the Ministry.”

“Really? No idea where he is now,” because Harry had no idea what Staffordshire Police did with remains recovered from suspicious house fires, especially not ones with nine millimetre holes in their skulls, “but Jane wrote a summary of his investigation which you should destroy after reading, it’s nearly as incriminating as the original. Should help you avoid getting nearly caught the same way. I’ll slip it under the cake-stand in a moment, while we’re serving ourselves. When I leave, I’ll loudly tell you I shan’t take that sort of nonsense from  _ any _ man, and you better not owl me again. It’ll be exactly what the local crones are expecting, and while their eyes are on me you can take it.”

“That’s one thing,” Weasley said, visibly wincing at the thought of the scene Harry was proposing to make, “What’s the other?”

“We’re going to be making a very big play this winter. We’re going to need a huge distraction at the Ministry. You need to have something ready to go by 29th November, and any time after that day you’ll have twenty-four hours’ notice by Jane’s usual means of letting you know to go see your dead-drop, whatever that might be. On the named date you need to be in work early, that part’s important in case what we do makes them lock the doors. Once you’re in, be ready to trigger whatever you’ve prepared at half past ten unless you hear from Jane with different timings.”

Weasley frowned. “Do you want anything in particular?”

“I’m told this one’s for all the marb- er, gobstones, so make it big, spectacular, and unmissable. Explosions and fire at a minimum. If you can make it look like the real plan is actually the diversion for an attack on the Ministry that’d be perfect.”

“Noted,” Weasley said, “and just off the cuff I think I shall dedicate this one to the memory of my brothers Fred and George. An inventive pair of hooligans, those two, and amazing with novel potion effects. I’m fairly sure I can recreate some of their more pyrotechnic feats, and if I’m around to stir up the chaos a little, so much the better, eh? Now, how do you take your tea? And can I help you to a vol-au-vent _? _ ”

“A slice of lemon and two lumps,” Harry said, going for the girliest possible option he could think of, “and just one of the mushroom ones. A girl has to watch her figure, you know.”

Weasley put a pastry in front of Harry, neatly covering Harry’s sleight of hand with Jane’s notes, and attended to the teapot. As he was pouring, he asked, “There’s been no official word, but a few people have noticed there have been -  _ disappearances _ . Does anyone on your side know anything about those? I’ve heard people worrying that the Snatchers have them. Whole families in some cases. Outside the Ministry I’ve overheard talk that there might be a way to get out of the country that isn’t closed off.”

Harry could spot an opsec problem as well as anyone: Weasley did not need to know and was  _ extremely  _ capture-prone every time he clocked in at work. The lack of official response was surprising, though. They’d been moving half a dozen families a week out of the country since late July, and in a population as small as Magical Britain that ought to have been noticed and responded to by now. “I think,” Harry said, covering up his pause for thought with what he hoped was a ladylike sip of tea, “that you should say, next time someone brings it up, that the higher-ups know what they’re doing and that everyone who’s properly loyal to the Ministry has nothing to fear.” He finished up with a bright and cheerful smile.

Weasley recovered from his shocked expression quite quickly. “I dare say that ought to scare everyone silly,” he said.

“While making you look like an upstanding Ministry loyalist, yes. I’m sorry, but you’re too valuable to risk, so if there is an evacuation going on - might be, might not, if there is they’re maintaining good operational security - you need to look like the absolute last person to approach.” Another thought occurred to Harry while he was chewing a dainty bite of mushroom vol-au-vent, “In fact, assuming Snape wasn’t the only one who was on to you, or if someone figured out what he was looking in to and puts that together with him disappearing, the sensible thing for the enemy to do would be to have a ringer approach you about getting them out of the country. Probably be a very convincing one, too. Up to you how you handle it, of course, but if it was me I’d start with the official denial that the disappearances are a problem, move on to pretending not to understand what they’re asking you for, and then turn them in as traitors if they really push. They won’t get in trouble, of course, because they’ll be secret agents.” 

Harry  _ hoped. _ Weasley had famously gone all-in with the same regime that had imprisoned his brothers and executed his father, so anyone who tried to use him as a point of contact for the resistance in general or the Order in particular  _ had _ to be a ringer. Risking Weasley’s position in the Ministry on the vanishingly small chance that there really were people stupid enough to ask him about escape opportunities? Absolutely not worth it.

“I suppose,” Weasley said, his reluctance compounding Harry’s discomfort.

“Where you are, you’re  _ important, _ ” Harry told him, “more lives depend on you achieving all the things you can with the Ministry’s trust. Anyone really pushing you for help in that direction - they  _ have _ to be agents trying to catch you out.” 

Although Harry had been trying to convince himself as much as Weasley, it seemed to have worked. “Fine,” Weasley said, “and you’re probably right. Also, if I couch my expression of loyalty in the terms you suggested, I’ll more than likely frighten off anyone that genuinely wants to get out. Convince them to look elsewhere. Who knows, they might even find help?”

“They might.” Harry checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. “Jane’s notes are under the cake-stand like I promised. I’ve got five minutes before I have to leave, and for safety’s sake I should move sooner. Any message for her, any questions?”

Weasley paused long and thoughtfully. At length, he said, “No, I don’t think so. I’ll make notes of whatever plan I come up with and leave them at the usual place along with my regular reports. From here on in I’ll not go longer than two days without leaving at least something: if I’m caught you’re going to want at least some hint that you can no longer count on me.”

They would. If Weasley was caught, he was dead if he was  _ lucky _ . They’d have to assume that the enemy would wring him dry and be put on their guard. If that happened, hope shrank to the prospect of the enemy getting bored and relaxing by the time the Solstice rolled around because they’d thought the attack was going to be on or shortly after the 29th of November. “Be careful,” he told Weasley, “if you visit a dead drop too often, it risks compromise.” Or so Harry had read in some spy novel or other.

“Not that risky,” Weasley said with a wry grin, “I don’t know how long you’ve known Jane, but she was a sharp one at eleven and has only got more capable as she got older. Unless she specifically, in terms, and with intent tells you where my dead drop is, you simply can’t know. You can’t even know that it  _ is _ a dead drop. A very rare and powerful charm, very few are able to work it. She helped Dumbledore  _ improve _ it, and used some muggle thing called ‘information theory’ to give it real  _ teeth _ . It used to be that the secret keeper could give the secret away unwittingly, but now it requires  _ intent  _ to reveal. The head of the DMLE himself could follow me, watch me pick up a letter and drop off a report. He wouldn’t be able to hold the knowledge of what he’d seen in his mind unless he’d heardþe secret from Jane. While I’m  _ en route _ to and from that place with the formed intention of conveying information, I’m perfectly safe, because the charm protects the secret from being revealed even by deductive reasoning.”

Harry nodded. “All the same, don’t get cocky. That sense of security might be what let Snape get as close as he did to catching you.”

“Perhaps,” Weasley allowed, “and you have my word that I’ll be careful between now and whatever spectacular you have planned.”

“Good. Now, brace yourself. As soon as those monkeys are back in my handbag, I’m going to make a scene and then my getaway to the  _ enormous _ satisfaction of that collection of miserable old trouts behind me. While they’re watching me flounce out, grab the paper and storm out in a raging huff before they get chance to interrogate you.”

“A good plan,” Weasley agreed as Harry swept the monkeys off the table.

Harry shot to his feet. “HOW VERY DARE YOU!” he shrieked.

It went off like clockwork. Harry made it back to his hotel room with two minutes to spare, and he was still giggling like a naughty schoolboy three hours later.

**Charing Cross, London, 26 September 2004**

Harry had been mildly surprised to discover that the magical world’s efforts at secrecy extended to ensuring that about fifty metres of Charing Cross Road didn’t appear on any map. You could walk along it, wizard and muggle alike, and plenty did. There were muggle shops on both sides of the extra bit of street, and a side alley on the same side as the Leaky Cauldron that took a left turn to meet Cecil Court. Which was  _ also _ a fair bit longer than it ought to be. And the surrounding streets looked subtly different on the ground than they did on the maps, like there was something in between them that bulged them outward: Cecil Court was straight on the map, but visibly curved if you looked down it from either end.

He had no idea why that was. Jane theorised that the unplottability charms on the Alley itself had been sloppily cast and that was what affected the surrounding area. The important thing was that it confirmed that Diagon Alley wasn’t in some expanded pocket dimension, and so could be seen into from the outside.

So long as you weren’t a Muggle, Harry supposed, but he didn’t have that problem as he lay prone on a flat part of one corner of the roof of the Garrick Arms. The chances of anyone down below noticing him were near non-existent, but he was wearing an invisibility cloak anyway and had every single spare one they possessed spread over him and the roof behind him. There were tall buildings nearby and the non-magical world would know  _ exactly _ what he was aiming down into Diagon Alley. It would put a crimp in his plans for the day should they call for the more serious branches of the Metropolitan Police.

“Bad old master is moving up the Alley, Lieutenant sir,” came Lance-Corporal Dobby’s whisper in his ear. The elf was invisible somewhere in the Alley, while Private Oshin was in charge of watching his rear and, later, apparating Harry back to Blackburn. 

Harry didn’t bother with his binoculars. Diagon Alley wound around and about when you looked at it from the outside - it was charmed to look straight if you were actually in it, nobody much caring if the resulting visual distortion made most of the buildings look wonky - and from where he was perched he only had a view down two short sections of it. 

On one of them was the rostrum from which the Minister of Magic Lucius Malfoy would be addressing a hand-picked crowd today, and the laser rangefinder that had been surprisingly cheap from Maplins gave him a range of eighty metres. Harry was mildly sad that the library next door was two stories shorter. Getting to shoot a head of state from a book depository had real historical resonance that he was missing out on: sniping from the flat roof of the back annexe of a pub just wasn’t the same.

Only a couple of minutes passed before a party of wizards and witches in elegantly-tailored black robes mounted the podium. Not including, Harry noted as he panned his scope across the assembled magical dignitaries, Darth Bastard. It was too much to hope that  _ he _ would come out in public. He might be impossible to kill, but shooting him would be  _ cathartic _ .

There was only one wizard answering Lucius Malfoy’s description on the podium, and he looked enough like his son that Harry had to take a moment for breathing exercises so as not to give in to the surge of hatred and just let drive right away. When he got his eye back to the scope the dignitaries were lined up to the rear of the podium and some flunkey was to the front, standing at a lectern and making some sort of introductory speech.  _ About standard for this sort of bollocks, _ Harry thought,  _ god forbid the toff in charge start talking without someone coming on first to remind us all how important he is _ .

The flunkey was acceptably brief in reminding the assembled crowd how big his boss’s cock was - you occasionally got some fucker who went into lengthy raptures about how nice it tasted, too - and stepped aside doing that over-theatrical up-high clapping that reminded the crowd that it was time to applaud or else. Harry’d seen it at school assemblies a time or two, and apparently it didn’t change when you got into politics.

Malfoy stepped up to the podium and struck a pose. Chin lifted, blond hair flowing back from the noble brow, nose elevated so he could look down it at the little people. Without really thinking about it, Harry picked the moment the over-groomed tool opened his mouth to speak as the best time to squeeze the trigger.

Malfoy convulsed as the round went through his head, and Harry followed up with two more somewhat more hurried shots as he crumpled. He could only be sure one of them had hit, right into the chest cavity.

He thumbed the selector to automatic and waited for the other dignitaries to gather around. They obliged him, wands raised in all directions, and he could see the faint shimmer of shield charms.

“Science time,” he muttered, and emptied the magazine, firing rounds that had taken him three days to enchant in the space of four seconds. The bullets punched through the shield charms and there was a satisfying amount of carnage and visibly-injured bad guys. There was at least one that no amount of magical healing could help: sheer luck had put a round through someone’s head. There were probably a couple more that wouldn’t make it to a healer, judging by the amount of flying claret, but it wasn’t sensible to sit around admiring his handiwork. With the magazine empty, he made safe, muttered “Experiment successful,” and wormed his way back from the edge of the roof. 

Rolling over to sit up, being careful not to come out from under the cloaks, he reflected that it was a nice demonstration of how the standard shield charm could be beaten. Or, at least, a nice demonstration of the same _that left_ _living witnesses_. Teaching the enemy to proceed slowly and carefully required that particular thing to happen, and Harry wanted the lesson firmly in place by December. Jane and Molly alike reckoned it’d take them months to find shield charms that’d hold up to magic bullets and get everyone trained up on them.

He’d been doing an ambush a week since that first one back in June, and all he’d managed to teach the enemy so far was that apparating to somewhere a little distant from the Taboo and spreading out made sure that not all of them went down in the first blast. For some reason they were apparating back out rather than shielding, seeking cover, or attacking into the ambush once the explosions went off, and the ones that couldn’t apparate were generally in no condition to cast anything anyway. So, making sure the Ministry knew that standard-issue shield charms were useless now required a more obvious demonstration unless Harry wanted to take risks with his own life and limb by tempting the stronger Snatchers to stay behind.

The prospect of several weeks of disorganisation at the Ministry in the wake of an unscheduled change of Minister wasn’t to be sniffed at, either. Reading through Jane’s detailed files on the enemy leadership, the impression he got was that the current Ministry was what happened when you put a bunch of careerists with personality disorders into a confined space and told them to have at it without regard to the actual mission of the organisation. 

Harry could only hope that the competition to fill the resulting vacancies - whoever became Minister would leave a job vacant, and  _ his  _ replacement likewise, and so on right to the bottom of the scrotum pole - would turn homicidal at least once. It certainly sounded more entertaining than the  _ muggle _ civil service.

“Lance Corporal, clean up all traces we were ever here and return to base when you’re done. Private Oshin, take me home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> Harry is making a common mistake in conflating Irish Travellers (as depicted in the movie Snatch) with Romani. They’re two distinct peoples with origins on different continents, for all that form following function makes them hard to tell apart from a distance. The confusion is not helped any by ‘Pikey’ being the racists’ slur of choice for both peoples alike.
> 
> American readers can stop giving me the side eye and understand that faggots are baked pork-and-suet meatballs, sometimes done wrapped in bacon (best way!) and had that name centuries before the slur sense of the word was first attested around 1914. Molly serves them here with the traditional trimmings. Really Traditional faggots are made with bits of the pig rich people turn their noses up at, always the mark of a Really Traditional recipe. If you can’t make your own - there are plenty of recipes online, at least one of which is flat-out illegal in the US - Mr. Brain’s Faggots are exported world wide and nearly as good, if a bit short of the rich flavour of homemade ones due to leaving out most of the Alarming Organ Meat. 
> 
> Summer pudding is made by layering whatever berries are in season together with bread or cake into a mould. You press it as you layer so the fruit juice soaks into the bread/cake and it becomes cohesive. Chill it for a few hours while keeping it pressed, turn it out - if you’ve done it right it keeps its shape, a smear of butter in the mould helps - and serve it with thick cream or ice cream. It’s usually done in single-serving moulds, but I’ve seen it done with a ring mould and cut into slices. Simple, delicious, and all but free if you know how to forage. 
> 
> The Register of National Monuments for the UK alone has over six thousand entries with the keyword ‘henge’ in them, and Ireland has them in plenty too. 
> 
> West Country accent: like the West Midlands speech mentioned last chapter, actually a group of similar-sounding accents from the area covered by the old kingdoms of Wessex and Cornwall. And, due to an accident of casting in a really popular remake of Treasure Island that got imitated by everyone, famed the world over as ‘talking like a pirate.’
> 
> The dazzling metropolis of Wookey Hole had a population of less than 500 at last census, and gets a mention here because it’s amusingly-named and the home of a show-cave of considerable repute. One of the stalagmites is reputed to be a petrified witch. Really is a petrified witch in the Potterverse: Muriel was visiting to pay her respects.
> 
> I’ve not even tried with the procedure for boarding a Eurostar. I walked past Waterloo International nearly every weekday for five years, but I was a commuter in a hurry and never paid attention. 
> 
> Prisoner of Azkaban doesn’t say that Lupin’s handful of flames spell is wandless. It also doesn’t say it’s not wandless, and he’s not described as drawing his wand until after he has a handful of fire - I specifically checked. So I’m not taking much of a liberty by having Harry learn it. (While checking I also learned that my years of remembering it as blue flames were wrong. No colour is given at all, the only description is ‘shivering’.) 
> 
> It’s true about the name Dobby, they’re native to Lancashire and Yorkshire (although not the bit of Lancashire I grew up in, where they were called Hobs, but then I lived a fair way away from the border with Yorkshire.)
> 
> The Brat’s Hill stone circle is the largest of what are called the Burnmoor circles. Bit of a misleading name: if you want to see them they’re far nearer Boot in Eskdale, and there’s an easily-followed trail up (although the first time I visited I was hiking over from the campsite at Wasdale Head). 
> 
> Am I the only one that thinks cross-sleeving with polyjuice is gender dysphoria in a bottle? Fleur plainly hates it when she does it in Deathly Hallows. Hermione only seems bothered with Harry’s eyesight, wonder what that’s about? (More seriously, everyone’s going to have a slightly different reaction. Be a funny old world if we were all alike.)
> 
> Astute readers will have noticed Harry making another Blackadder reference in this chapter. The BBC Comedy Greats channel on Youtube has the first appearance of The Gorgeous Georgina, a real eye-opener for everyone who thinks Mr. Bean and House were the starts of their respective stars’ careers.
> 
> Elizabeth Duke is a brand of affordable bling for ladies, sold through Argos. Used to be a sort of shop-within-a-shop, don’t recall when they stopped doing that.
> 
> Fic Recommendations: ‘A Matter of House’ by EmeraldAshes (of Seventh Horcrux fame) on FFN only. (For some reason EmeraldAshes doesn’t post their potterverse work on AO3.) Also ‘Hello, my name is Alastor Moody. You get that wrong, prepare to die.’ by Starchart (on AO3 only as far as I can tell). Well crafted, and it made me cheer at the start, cackle maniacally in the middle, and mist up a bit at the end, there.


	9. Harassment and Interdiction

DISCLAIMER: What is it that makes it fanfic? It's not something you can program. You can't put it into a chip. It's the strength of the human heart. The difference between us and JK Rowling.

* * *

**Chapter 9**

**Blackburn, Lancashire, 2 October 2004**

A quick look at the clock told Harry he had time for one more attempt, and it had nearly worked the last couple of times. He was pretty sure if he didn’t get it on this attempt, it’d not take long into his next session. 

Jane might not have been able to draw him up a program of study, but he’d been taught to organise and prioritise and make checklists and generally break learning down into bite-size bits and tackle the easy wins first. This spell looked like the easiest on the list he’d headed ‘senses’. The gesture part of it was just squint-and-peer, there was some visualisation, and a mantra-like incantation that had to be repeated until the spell went off.

Harry took a deep breath, set himself to the task, and began murmuring the mantra. No idea what it meant in english, but apparently that didn’t matter so long as he had the right idea and got the rhythm and pronunciation right.

_It worked!_

He held the spell in his eyes - he’d need to practise this one until he could do it while concentrating on something else - watching the world around him light up in ghostly radiance. He’d used night-vision kit, had bought his own with Jane’s transfigured cash, but this was loads better. It’d work in absolute pitch dark, widened his peripheral vision, and sharpened his other senses to boot.

There was a muted pop from the back yard: the house’s old outside toilet had needed little work to convert into an incoming-apparation room with counter-surveillance spells on it. Harry went to the back door to let Molly in. “Tea?” he asked.

“Oh, love one,” she said, easing herself wearily into a chair at the kitchen table, “I’ve been all night and morning getting soup and potions and calpol into Lilibet Shelby’s youngest, poor thing’s down with the mumps. When I wasn’t doing that, I was discreetly casting cleaning charms to make sure she doesn’t spread it round the whole site. I find whichever daft cow sent her child into that school with it and spread it to half the kids, she’ll not sit comfy for a while, I can tell you. Him that convinced everyone not to get vaccinated is in for it if I catch him, too.”

Harry chuckled as he busied himself with the kettle, “I can see you kicking someone’s arse easy enough, I have to say.”

“I was thinking more ingrowing-hair hexes, actually,” Molly said, favouring Harry with a malevolent grin as he winced at the thought of an ingrowing hair that’d make it tricky to sit down, “did you know your eyes were twinkling?”

“New spell,” Harry said, “some old silver-miner’s thing Jane found in a book about Central American magic. Lets me see in the dark, sharper vision, better peripherals, and sharper senses all round.”

“Ooh, that’s handy. I shall have to learn that one myself for when I’m out mushrooming. And nice to see that she’s giving you little presents like that. There’s still some feeling left in that one, I reckon.”

Molly’s grin left Harry in no doubt what was coming next, she being a proud performer of the art of Ribald Old Lady Humour. Not really expecting to head the teasing off any, he tried for a repressive tone. “She’s expanding the capabilities of her team, is all.”

“That’s what she _said_ , all right,” Molly answered with the air of someone who had a killer argument, “and I dare say she believes it in that clockwork mind of hers. There’s a heart still beating under that curse, though, and if giving you little gifts of things she values ain’t courtin’, I don’t know what is.”

Harry put a mug of tea down in front of Molly. “Don’t matter,” he said, “what little feelings she’s got left, I’m not nearly enough of a jack bastard to mess with them.” And, it went without saying, also not enough of a shit to go out on the pull to relieve some of the tension. Thank _fuck_ for internet porn. Which thought lost him his concentration on his spell, and his vision went back to normal.

“That’s as may be, but don’t you try and tell me you wouldn’t if you could,” She was grinning suggestively, “and if she’d not if she could she hasn’t the sense god gave a rabbit.”

It took Harry a moment to decipher the old-lady-ese. “Well, we’ll see if we actually like each other once we’re both back to being in our right minds,” he said, sliding a packet of biscuits across the table at her.

“Ooh, you remembered I like the plain chocolate hobnobs, good boy. Keep up the good work. I might just take a run at you myself, if Jane doesn’t.”

He gave her as repressive a look as he could manage. Even if she _was_ quite tidy for pushing sixty, she was still pushing sixty. “By the time it becomes an issue,” he said, “I’ll be a kid and you’ll be a married woman again.”

She snorted. “How pleased I’ll be to see Arthur alive, poor man’ll probably die on the job and I’ll be a merry widow again. Planning ahead, see?”

Harry chuckled in spite of himself, and reckoned he out to get a shot in of his own, “The ritual’s kit-off, so I suppose I’ll get to examine the merchandise.”

“As will Jane and I, we’ll just have to make allowances for the cold and use our imagination. Speaking of Jane, where is she?”

Harry shrugged. “Not sure. She should’ve been back at the same time as you got here, she’s out collecting dead-drops. She’s only a few minutes overdue, though.”

There was a pop from the back yard. “That’ll be her, then,” Molly observed, dunking one of her biscuits.

It was, and she immediately sat down with a sheaf of paper and parchment. “I will read these quickly.”

Harry didn’t bother to ask if she wanted to eat or drink, simply busying himself with getting her a brew and a couple of biccies. 

It took her maybe five minutes of speed-reading and absently munching on hobnobs before she spoke. “The disorder at the Ministry following Lucius Malfoy’s death is at the upper range of what we predicted. Gossip in the Ministry canteen has it that as well as the extinction of the Malfoys in the male line, the last of the British McLaggens died in a duel and the estates have passed to the Irish branch of the family. Five critical posts still remain unfilled pending inquiries into misconduct allegations by prospective appointees against other prospective appointees. Percival reports that without Malfoy enmity he has been able to secure promotion to Departmental Under-Secretary rank which will improve his prospects for causing what he describes as ‘significant mayhem’ when we give him the signal for his diversion.”

Molly harrumphed. “Still not going to spare the little shit if I get near enough.”

“We also have a list of home addresses of senior enemy personnel,” Jane added, ignoring Molly’s remark and distracting Harry from saying anything. He was a bit concerned Molly would take that attitude back in time with her and give them all away. “My source had been stymied by anti-copying charms until I reminded them that those charms do not protect against manual note-taking that is not a direct copy.”

“That’s good,” Molly said, “there’s that lovely phrase Harry has, Force Reduction, do I have that right?”

Harry nodded.

Molly gave him a nod in return and turned to Jane, “So, before we get to arranging to give Harry here a shufti at the Ministry of Magic, which of these blighters are best placed to get in our way on the twenty-first?”

**Craig’s Court, Whitehall, London, 3 October 2004**

Craig’s Court was another of those streets that was longer on the ground than it was on the map. Harry and Molly, potion-disguised as random muggles who’d stopped in for a drink at the pub across from a solitary phone box, were watching as people came out of the phone box without going in first.

“How does nobody notice?” Harry asked, taking a sip of the pint he’d been grievously overcharged for. The pub had tables by the front window, the tall sort with barstools, and a clear view over the top of the frosting that obscured the lower half of the window.

“The usual nothing-to-see-here magics. The few that can see through it, there’s another spell that makes them remember something else they ought to be doing if they think about it too hard or go too close for a better look.”

Harry nodded, the three wise monkeys thing they had on the table did something similar, and he’d seen Jane include it as part of the security back at the Blackburn house. He’d got far enough in his study of runes that he could even understand some of the spells she’d carved into slates and bricks that she’d magically worked into the fabric of the building. “Good security against civilians. What’s keeping _us_ out?”

“Right now? Common sense,” Molly said, “because anyone going _in_ that way goes in right through the heaviest security. It _used_ to be one wizard who just checked wands and directed people where they needed to go, but Jane’s spy says it’s a barrier now. All it is for us is a way out: because we won’t be coming at it from the strong side, we should be able to break through fairly easily. We’re still waiting to know whether the floo access is restricted to people or fireplaces. If it’s people, or if they start getting clever about guarding their homes, there’s the workers’ entrance for the little people, and that’s in the public conveniences out on Whitehall there. Far as the muggles know, they were closed and filled with concrete about twenty years ago. The Ministry had some reason for taking them over and hiding them, I don’t know what exactly.”

Harry had managed to control his wince at the inevitable souring of Molly’s mood when Percy came up in conversation, and decided to soldier on anyway, “What, like a secret door?”

“More like a watery version of the floo. You stand in the bowl and flush yourself away.”

“What.”

“My thoughts exactly. There’s a reason it never caught on, but they’re making Ministry workers use it to get in and out if they’re not important enough to floo in, or apparate.” Molly smiled brightly, “Of course, I can’t say as it isn’t fitting that shit gets flushed on the regular.”

Harry snorted in amusement. Still, there was a serious point. “You going to be able to stay on task? I get where you’re fuckin’ hacked off at these people, don’t blame you a bit, but I’m worried, you know?”

“What, that I’ll stop to slit throats when I should be getting on with things? I ain’t that bad.” She looked away from Harry as she scoffed, making him worry more, rather than less. “Here, look -”

Harry followed where she was pointing. Big chap, in dark robes. Not the more usual priesty-looking ones that the more important wizards went for, what he was wearing was more like barrister robes. If they hadn’t been the wrong material. And if you could believe in a barrister that looked like his day-job was bare-knuckle prizefighting. The Errol Flynn-style moustache looked a little incongruous on him as he checked up and down the street before setting off toward Whitehall proper.

“ _That_ is Walden MacNair. What’s _he_ doing not flooing or apparating home?”

Harry had read Jane’s file on the man. MacNair had been beast-killer and executioner by appointment to the Ministry of Magic before Darth Bastard’s coup, and had graduated to head of the Snatchers and torturer-in-chief, sorry, Head Interrogator. Wrong ‘un any way you looked at him, and the only reason he wasn’t higher up either of Jane’s or Molly’s lists was that he wasn’t that bright. He did what he was ordered to do, and did it with enthusiasm and probably a stout erection, but was otherwise no more dangerous than any other dumb weapon. Molly’s question was a good one, though. “Well, if he’s not going home, and he’s not apparating, he’s got business within walking distance, no?”

“Leisurely walking distance, at that. Come on,” Molly said, scooping up the three wise monkeys statuette and shoving it into Harry’s hands, “let’s see what he’s up to and with any luck, he’ll go somewhere we can be discreet about putting him down. If he’s walking, it’s because he doesn’t want his boss knowing where he’s been.”

Harry frowned as he followed Molly out onto the street. About the only thing MacNair’s colleagues would disapprove of would be contact with muggles. Which, judging from his known tastes, probably wasn’t a good thing for the muggles in question. Molly had a point about taking the opportunity that had presented itself, but it was a point that ignored everything sensible about proper planning and preparation. An assassination wasn’t something you just threw together. Harry had brought - hooray for space-expanded pockets and daysacks - his rifle, a pistol, a golok machete he’d picked up at an army surplus place, and a pickaxe handle for completeness’ sake. He’d just have to hope that between that and Molly’s wand they had enough to take the man down discreetly.

Nothing else, they needed to not be following him closely enough to be spotted. “Lance Corporal Dobby,” he murmured as he lengthened his stride to catch up with Molly, “I need you to follow Walden MacNair invisibly and whisper in my ear where he’s going. Tell me every turn he makes so we can follow from a distance.”

“Yes, Lieutenant sah!” came the acknowledging whisper in his ear.

Reassuring Molly that they could slow down and not risk detection, Harry let Dobby lead them up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, past the National Gallery to Chinatown, where a couple of twists and turns saw MacNair check around himself before stepping into a covered side passageway off one of the smaller streets. Harry and Molly had made up the distance on him slowly but surely and were maybe ten seconds behind him. 

“Alley is a dead end, Lieutenant sah!”

“Thank you, Lance Corporal,” Harry murmured, and then out loud, “We’ve got until he goes indoors to hit him, Molly. Make ready.”

“Right you are,” she said, fiddling with the cuff of her left coat-sleeve to have her wand free for action, and fishing out the pendant she carried. It had an anti-disapparation jinx on it to stop her victims getting away if she could get within a third of a furlong of them.

For his part, Harry had unslung his daysack and reached into it to grip his rifle, while muttering the incantation for the sharp-eyes spell. Entering a dark alley after being out in late afternoon daylight, he’d need the magical help.

Turning the corner, cutting in close to let Molly come around on his right and have her wand arm free, he heard Dobby hiss, “Bad man has turned _back -_ ” right as he saw MacNair step around a set of of wheely-bins and freeze mid-step in surprise. He scarcely missed a beat as he pulled his wand out of a sleeve pocket.

With no time to spare to regret being safety-conscious and carrying his weapon unloaded, Harry dropped the backpack and brought his weapon up just like he’d been drilled in Phase One bayonet training.

What he _hadn’t_ had in Phase One was the spell that turned a punch or, more relevantly, a spear-thrust into a bolt of magical force. It was a spell he’d drilled for half an hour a day once he’d learned the spell and established that a fixed bayonet counted as enough of a spear to work. Jane had speculated that as a pure weapon of war it had ‘inherent hostile intent’ and the spell worked with that affinity.

Unlike all the practise hed’ done, however, this time it felt different, wonky, more effort and the magic was all _mushy_. Nevertheless, with a step-and-thrust and a snarled incantation the spell went off.

Whatever MacNair had planned doing with his wand out, he was like lightning getting a shield charm up. 

_Smart enough to recognise a gun?_ Harry wondered as he dropped to one knee to reach into his backpack for a magazine, noting that his spell hadn’t gone through MacNair’s shield but _had_ staggered him onto the back foot.

 _That_ let Molly step into line next to Harry and go on the immediate offensive, a string of muttered incantations spat like swearwords as her wand twitched and flicked.

 _Don’t get distracted, Harry_ . He fumbled seating the magazine. _Also, don’t get flustered, Harry_.

Magazine seated, made ready, take aim at centre-mass. MacNair was still purely on the defensive: Molly wasn’t giving him time or space to breathe, let alone think. Bright arcs, strange ripples in the air, creeping mists, jets of colour, pulses and waves of corposant in all the colours of the rainbow and a couple not found in consensus reality, crackling sounds that seared the nerve endings and hisses that spoke of nameless fears in the cold and dark, fast-moving spells and slow, released in a broken rhythm from Molly’s wand that became a steady, fast-tempo hammer-beat on MacNair’s shield when they arrived.

All MacNair could do was shore and reshape his shield charm, reinforce it with counter-curses, and cope with what got through by dodging or counter-spelling. Molly’s strategy seemed to be to keep him suppressed until he ran out of puff.

Whatever MacNair’s hopes were for weathering the storm and counter-attacking, Harry stroked his trigger. Range of a dozen paces, if that. He missed, the flare of penetrated shield well to the right of his target. Second shot, missed again. Was his sight out of zero? He adjusted by eye, missed closer. Tried again, missed the _other_ way.

 _Fuck it_ . Selecting automatic fire, he sprayed the rest of the magazine. _Throw enough shit at the wall, some it’s bound to stick_.

That did it: whether it was a hit, a really _startling_ near miss, or the strain of two dozen hits in a couple of seconds, MacNair lost focus on his shield charm. His defences dropped, and the terrible tide of Molly’s magical onslaught hit him square on, a double handful of lethal magics in rapid succession.

What hit the ground three seconds later was barely recognisable as human remains.

“Don’t think we’re getting any intel off _him_ ,” Harry muttered, frantically reloading in case there was some means of him getting up again. With magic involved, he was taking no chances.

“What was that you hit him with at first?” Molly was sketching a figure in the air with corposant from the tip of her wand, a spell Harry recognised as the one to lay ghosts. With magic involved, silencing a witness required extra steps.

“Japanese spell. Or I think it’s Japanese, anyway. Far east, at any rate. Turns spear and sword thrusts into bolts of force. There’s a version for punches, too.”

“Eh? You ain’t got a spear, though,” she said, gesturing at his gun.

“Bayonet,” he said, feeling the shakes start to kick in, “counts as a spear for the spell. I tested it.”

“Bayonet? That the knife thing that’s supposed to be on the end of your gun?”

“Yeah, that - oh.” Harry’s bayonet was, in fact, safely stowed in his backpack. “Huh. That would explain why it was so hard to get that spell off. And why it didn’t break his shield, for that matter. It’s supposed to, at short ranges like this.” Harry felt he had come by the massive embarrassment he was feeling _honestly_.

“No matter, Harry love,” Molly said, “you gave it enough welly to get it off anyway, and knocking him back on his heels like that was all I needed. A duellist purely on the defensive never lasts long.”

While she was talking, and casting spells to some purpose Harry didn’t know, he was checking his rifle before making safe. “Oh, _bugger_ ,” he murmured when he saw the problem. “The fuckin’ barrel’s _bent_ . It’s a wonder the bloody thing worked at all. I wonder how _that_ happened?” It was only a slight bend in the barrel proper, probably not visible without enhanced eyes, but the flash-hider would probably look wonky even without magical sight.

“Trying to use it with a bayonet that wasn’t there, maybe? Like using a broken wand, I shouldn’t wonder.” 

“Probably,” he agreed, “It was in perfect nick this morning. It being knackered’d explain why I missed those first few shots and had to chuck the lot at him.”

“Here, let me try - _telum reparo!”_ she tapped his rifle with her wand. Nothing happened. She tried again, “ _Machina reparo!”_ Again, nothing. “Oh dear. Not just broken, but _magically_ broken. Tell Jane what happened when you get home, she’ll be able to fix it for you. You’ve accidentally cursed it, probably, she’ll have to get that off before a repair charm will work.”

Harry nodded. He had a spare. Not that they were going to be hanging around for the investigation that’d be along any minute. “You coming back for a cuppa?”

“No love, I’ve got work in the morning, early. And some thinking to do. What you said, worrying about me going blood-mad. Which I am, there’s no denying, you’re right to worry about me letting it trip me up, but I reckon as I can cope. But what with -” she paused, took a deep breath, “Percival being only a boy again when we go back, I’m going to have to look to my feelings about him or I’ll drive him further and faster to the bad than he went the first time.”

“That you will,” Harry agreed, “and you know, it’s not like being a sensible civil servant was the wrong thing for him to do. He wasn’t to know Darth Bastard was going to come along and send it all to shit. Now, from the sounds he had a bad case of authority-worship, and that’s what led him astray. I don’t know how to get him turned around from that, you can’t order kids around like you can soldiers, I know _that_ from experience, but if you want to talk whatever ideas you’ve got through? I can sit and listen while you think out loud.”

While Harry was talking, Molly absently transfigured MacNair’s corpse into what looked like a beef bone as she spoke. One of the elves could dump it somewhere later. There was some magical-theory reason why vanishing anything that was or used to be sapient was more trouble than it was worth, so magical corpse disposal required lateral thinking. When she was done, she said, “Bless you, Harry, I might just take you up on that. Now, you call your wonderful elves and they can get us out of here without leaving apparition traces.”

**Unplottable Location, Suffolk, 14 October 2004**

“Ah, here comes our special guest star,” the man in the funny blotch-patterned muggle clothes said. He was peering through what looked like outsize opera glasses. “Mister Corban Theophrastus Yaxley, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and notorious Death Eater.”

Ottilie Yaxley couldn’t say anything. She had regained consciousness in the woods on the hill that overlooked her house. She was without her wand, and held securely tied and silenced under the wands of two of the Ministry’s Most Wanted. Bloody Molly Weasley. The Mudblood. Ottilia knew she was dead. All she could hope for was to die with dignity. She stiffened her upper lip as best she could.

“Ooh, he’s learned from how Avery got his legs blown off,” the man said, “And wasn’t it just a shame poor Avery couldn’t be got to St. Mungo’s fast enough? But Mr. Yaxley here has figured out that if he apparates to somewhere off the property and walks up the garden path with a nice bright lumos charm -”

“One point to Slytherin for good charms work,” Weasley put in, not taking her eyes off Ottilia for so much as a second.

“You’re as hard to impress as the East German judges, Molly. Still, Mr. Yaxley isn’t going to find a tripwire, because there isn’t one, and those flagstones weren’t suitable for putting a pressure trigger under. Of course, once they get used to _those_ we’ll be teaching a short course on remote detonations and then infra-red laser tripwires, and if we’ve still got time before we’ve won the war, motion and light sensors. By the time they’ve seen everything in my bag of tricks it’ll take them an hour of countermeasures every time if they want to survive coming home. Mr. Yaxley is, of course, smart enough to treat his own front door with the greatest of suspicion.” Ottilia didn’t understand half the words, but the tone - treating her husband’s mortal peril as some sort of _move_ in a sick parlour game - chilled her to the bone.

“After being made of money for Floo powder, it must’ve been a chore getting used to using _that_ ,” Weasley observed, “Which they had to once they all stopped keeping their Floo fires lit after that little surprise you sent the Carrows.”

“Oh, yes, that one was fun. Jane, you think they’ve figured out how we managed to get an unaccompanied drum of fertiliser and fuel oil through the floo network?”

The Mudblood answered with a curt, “Not yet. Nor are they likely to.”

“Well, we won’t spoil the surprise,” the man said, “if they get sloppy about leaving their floos lit, we might want to use it again. Who knows? We might have found a recipe for nerve gas by then. Ah, I think he’s decided the front door is safe. Which it is, of course, the pressure trigger is under the doormat.”

“He is casting detection spells for foreign magic,” the Mudblood droned.

“Which he won’t find, of course,” the man replied, “the only magic in the whole thing is in the shrapnel, and that doesn’t go active until exposed to flame, like from deflagrating home-made black powder. Got to love rune-spells, until they’re charged they’re no more magical than any other writing.”

There was a horrid fiery flash and, a fraction of a second later, a pair of deafening blasts louder than any cannon-blast charm.

“Oh, will you look at _that_ ,” the man said, “rune-shrapnel to bugger his shield-charm, and a couple of delayed mines to blow him back through his front door and spread him all over his own garden. Amazing what two ten-litre jugs of ANFO, fifteen kilos of roofing nails, and a couple of lumps of semtex will do.” He stood up and turned to face her. There was nothing to see: he was wearing some sort of knitwear mask. Beyond dark-coloured eyes, she couldn’t describe the man even if she survived.

“I regret to inform you, Mrs. Yaxley,” he said, “that your husband has fallen in his service to the Ministry of Magic. I’m sure he’ll be missed, what with being one of the clever and competent ones. Obviously we’re better people than your late husband, which is why we brought you out of the blast area. If your husband’s boss kills you to make it look like we’re as bad as him, well, that’s not on us, is it?”

“She’s heard enough, then?” Weasley asked, and at the man’s nod, “ _Stupefy!_ ” and Ottilia Yaxley knew no more.

“How long does that last?” Harry asked, peering down at the unconscious witch, “or will she have to be revived like you did when Private Oshin brought her out here?”

“Four or five hours,” Molly said, nudging her victim with her boot as her wand-work unwove the enchanted rope that had held her still, “although a lot go from stunned to asleep and so take longer to wake up.”

“All rune-brasses and mine debris vanished, Lieutenant SAH!” Dobby announced, after appearing with a pop, “Private Oshin reports all fires extinguished.”

“Good, very well done both of you,” Harry said, “here’s hoping they leave the floo connected so we can use it on the 21st.” It was a long shot, and planning for enemy stupidity was poor form, but giving the enemy an opportunity to _be_ stupid by forgetting to revoke floo privileges? A happy by-product of eliminating the too-clever-by-half Yaxley. Along, of course, with starting a promotion fight in the DMLE, a department critical to defending the Ministry.

If they did get that lucky, they’d be able to go straight into one of the more secure areas of the Ministry without any opposition, short-cutting the plan by hours and reducing the risks massively.

“We still do not know if the privileges are attached to the Floo hearth in Yaxley’s house or Yaxley personally,” Jane observed, swapping out magic-hiding rune-stones with much smaller ones to hide their departing apparition, which Oshin would bring back when he and Dobby had finished erasing the physical traces of their presence.

Harry shrugged. “Well, if it turns out we _can_ use the floo, we’d be proper gutted if we hadn’t laid the groundwork. And whats-her-face here doesn’t know how we got in, so we can use her place whenever we want, so long as we check for magical alarms first.”

“Magical alarm?” Molly asked.

“Well,” Harry said, “I’m assuming there’s a spell that does that? There was something like it in that museum, as I recall.”

“Caterwauling charm, I suppose - Jane, can those be made to go off at a distance?”

“They can. They are fortunately easy to detect, the action-at-a-distance link is magically loud. I remain concerned about the aspect of tonight’s operation that required disclosing information to Mrs. Yaxley.”

Molly grinned, “You’ll have to trust in us as still have our emotions, my girl. They’ll either think we’re idiots, and underestimate us, or think we’re trying to be cunning, and believe the exact opposite of everything we said to her. And then some of ‘em will think it’s a double bluff and argue that we’ve told them the truth _precisely_ to get ‘em to disbelieve it. I went to Hogwarts in more peaceable times than you did, and winding up the dimmer slytherins with this sort of thing was always good fun. So wedded to being _cunning slytherins_ they take leave of common sense altogether, the poor dears. The good ones grow out of it, of course, but we’re not dealing with the good ones, are we?”

Harry nodded. “Can’t speak to the whole slytherin thing, but doing your best to drive the enemy up the wall with doublethink? Fine old tradition of warfare, that.” All his favourite bits of military history had been about deception plans. Winning through cleverness seemed somehow more _satisfying_.

**Blackburn, Lancashire, 4 November 2004**

It was another tea-and-biscuits session around the kitchen table in the Blackburn house.

“Absent you undertaking a study of at least the basics of information theory, I cannot explain why. However, as a rule of thumb, if a formally-defined Secret is known to anyone but the caster, who must also be the Secret Keeper, only the old version of the spell can be used. Even a suspicion, if it derives from direct observational knowledge, is enough resistance to make the improved version of the spell practically impossible.” Giving explanations brought Jane quite near to normal human animation. Even when she was shooting down Harry’s brilliant idea for concealing their time travel secret.

“The regular spell, though?” Molly asked, “Not that I’m any less at sea with it, but a secret known to only five should be fairly safe, no? If we’re all in at the casting?”

“That _would_ work. To be at least semi-permanent within our reduced power levels in the past, however, all five of us who possess the information would have to be joint Secret Keepers. It would make inadvertent revelation much more difficult in inverse proportion to how much suspicion we aroused between our arrival and performing the spell.”

Harry thought he followed. “Anyone who _didn’t_ suspect would _never_ suspect, but to anyone who already suspected, a slip-up could count as revealing the Secret?”

“Correct. The classic Fidelius Charm has a number of vulnerabilities beyond the obvious means of compromising a known Secret Keeper, which is why it is only useful in situations where security-by-obscurity already exists, such as protecting a location that is already magically obscured. Well known secrets or publicly recorded addresses, even if not well enough known to make the spell impossible, shorten its life and make its unscheduled collapse more likely. Without a precise prediction of when precisely we will arrive in the past, which I may or may not have before the ritual date, we cannot plan for a period of vulnerability of known length. The longer we must go, the greater the risk of giving rise to inadvertent suspicion.”

“I’m at less risk than you two,” Molly observed. “Snape was a known legilimenser, as was Albus. Of the two, I can’t say which is more likely to casually go snooping in students’ heads, although Snape’ll have more opportunity. My kids reckoned he was a bugger for knowing when they were lying to him, though.”

“Truthsaying is a non-invasive application of the art,” Jane said, pre-empting Harry being able to air one of the things he knew, “although invasive legilimency would be of a piece with his other inappropriate behaviours around children.”

Harry frowned. “You’re saying he was a nonce?” Snape was the only person he’d shot up close and personal, outside of a straight fight, and he suddenly felt a lot better about that.

“Not as far as I know,” Jane said, “although I cannot rule it out as Memory Charms make detection of such offenses notoriously difficult.”

Molly scoffed. “That was about the only rumour about him that _didn’t_ go around, as it happens. Him being a brain-burglar, though, that didn’t come out until later. I think I might do a little judicious gossip on that score.”

“As a secondary objective it is worthwhile. Encouraging Dumbledore to view his spy’s actions more critically and be more proactive in monitoring his behaviour will limit the sabotage he can engage in.”

“As well as keeping Dumbledore out of our hair. He’s going to be a bugger when I get away from the Dursleys, if nothing else.” Harry had added his own plan for that to Jane’s. He’d have the elves sneak him out from Hogwarts as soon as he arrived. He’d need five minutes with a public telephone to cause enough trouble that the Dursleys would _probably_ throw him out of their own free will. If it didn’t, he’d have Dobby and Oshin pretend to be summoned demons or something, and threaten her and Vernon into formally throwing him out.

“We’ll know where Albus stands when I turn in that little shit Pettigrew,” Molly said, “because he’ll be making a _full_ confession when I frogmarch him into the DMLE. They might not be allowed to give him truth potions, but there’s nothing says they can’t write down what he says, nor take an affidavit off me as to what I put down his throat. _Then_ we’ll see where Albus stands on exonerating your godfather.”

Jane gave a head tilt, and after a moment’s thought, “Without Snape’s interference, Dumbledore would have to intervene directly to prevent due process: our plan covers a great many contingencies. It remains to be seen whether Dumbledore would oppose others’ interference against Sirius’ exoneration: there are a number of parties who have relevant motives and Dumbledore might well simply let the ordinary course of politics condemn Sirius. A further risk is that in the event of Sirius Black achieving his liberty and seeking custody of Harry, Dumbledore may be motivated to make a public statement about Lily Potter’s protective charm on Harry in order to keep him with the Dursleys. One of our goals is to conceal that protection from the enemy leader until it is most tactically useful.”

Harry rocked his hand in doubt, “I don’t want to bet too much on that, to be honest. From what you said it only worked on skin contact, and I don’t fancy relying on hand-to-hand combat. Besides, if I ham it up a bit I can have him convinced that Vernon has me half way to turning Death Eater. Growing up with that fucker _did_ have me nearly facing attempted murder charges at fifteen, after all. Had to have actual therapy and everything. If Dumbledore thinks the Dursleys have made me into a ticking time-bomb he might get me out of there himself.”

Jane nodded. “That may work if we go back far enough that he finds it plausible. A later arrival time may make him suspicious of a change in you, especially if it occurs after he has had time to perform legilimency on you.” 

Molly’s grin was vicious. “You’re assuming he’ll be as rational as you about it. He’s capable of some _remarkable_ contortions if he thinks it’s on him to guide someone away from the dark. Should’ve heard him bending my Bill’s ear about all the stuff he knew from his work on Egyptian ruins, especially the Greek stuff, and what a moral hazard it was just to know it all existed and how he should keep his conscience informed.”

Harry crooked an eyebrow. “You’re painting quite the picture,” he said. Having gone through the mill with counsellors and RE teachers and pastoral carers and, later, Army chaplains, he’d had to smile and nod his way through a great deal of well-meaning priggery.

Molly chuckled. “Colourful one, Albus being Albus. Bloody hypocrite, if Skeeter had the right of it.”

Harry shrugged. Until he got his memories back he was taking several peoples’ word for it. “Well, given the uncertainties we’re working under, I suppose I’ll have to play it by ear,” 

**Brecon Beacons, Wales, 21 November 2004**

“Had to happen sooner or later,” Harry murmured, assuming Molly was still close enough to hear. Invisibility magics - Harry’s cloak, Molly’s charm-work - made it a touch hard to keep track of allies. While the gravelly, loose soil of the ditch they were taking cover in meant that she couldn’t have moved all that stealthily, she had her wand and Harry had been yelling the Taboo words at the top of his lungs every half minute for the last five.

“What did?” her voice came from somewhere close by.

“They’re finally trying to be tactical,” Harry said, “and not making too bad a job if it. We’re surrounded. Couple of dozen that I can see, maybe a few more that I can’t.” 

There was a swish as of something moving under fabric - Molly’s wand under her cloak. “Yes, surrounded. Looks like thirty or so. And they’ve got jinxes on apparition, portkeys, broom flight and something I’ve not seen before. Feels like a safety charm of some sort, maybe?”

Harry had an ugly thought. “Lance Corporal? Can you hear me?”

“Lance Corporal Dobby reportin’ as ordered Lieutenant Sah!” Dobby said, springing into existence with a faint pop and salute.

“Whatever it is, it’s no bar to elf travel, then,” Harry said, returning the salute, “Lance Corporal, can _you_ identify the spells the enemy have cast over this area?”

“Lance Corporal Dobby hears spells against travel, and one against fast-burning fire, Lieutenant Sah!”

“Thank you, Lance Corporal, back to your post please,” and with an exchange of salutes the elf was gone, up to the crag overlooking the wide, flat, shallow saddle they’d set up on. The Beacons were full of overlooked little spots like this, happily bereft of dry-stone walls that might provide cover for suddenly-appearing wizards. There was a _small_ risk of running into former colleagues in training, the main reason Harry had not used the Brecons before, but the elves were brilliant at keeping watch for that sort of thing.

“Fast-burning fire?” Molly asked.

“One of the known magical counters to firearms,” Harry said, “Jane enchanted all my guns to be immune to it, same spell that lets you have a fire in your stove despite the fireproofing charms on your caravan. Shows they’re learning, all right, although they’re going to get a shock when they discover it don’t work on high explosives. Which is all the mines and the detcord. They think they’ve got us surrounded and trapped, and they’re taking their time. The _interesting_ question -” There was a murmuration of magic, strong enough that even Harry caught it. “What was that?”

“Revealing charm. They know there’s two of us here. Probably didn’t get the elves, the charm for thinking minds generally rather than humans in particular is devilish tricky. And very directional, so unless they’re checking _everything_ they don’t know about the elves.”

“Well, I’m used to it, but this is your first time. We’re bait.” 

“That we are,” Molly agreed, “and heaven knows I’ve lost enough weight to pass for a worm.”

Harry scoffed, pulling out his periscope and lifting it up for a scan, shrouded in his invisibility cloak, “Your concerns about your figure notwithstanding -” he held up a hand, “- and taking the cracks about age just being a number as read, we’ve got five, no, six groups and they’re all in Death Eater uniforms.” 

“They finally ran out of Snatchers, then?”

“Or they’ve given the rank-and-file snazzy new uniforms to up the intimidation factor.” It didn’t do to assume that the contents of said uniforms were _actual_ Death Eaters. Although, now Harry came to examine the idea, it didn’t seem too likely: these were a status-obsessed people. Given the amount of bollocks the five of them had caused - even leaving out the evacuations, it was still _months_ of ambush, sniping, booby-traps and related games of silly buggers - escalation was only to be expected, “Or they decided to send the first eleven after us.”

“There’s more than -”

“Sports saying. Eleven on a football or cricket team. Do you say first seven, if you follow Quidditch?”

“No idea, bloody stupid game.” Molly had flipped her cloak back and was doing something with one of those folding makeup mirror things and her wand. Harry guessed at some sort of surveillance spell, with the mirror to hold the image from her farseeing. “Why are they doing _that_?” she said after a short moment of staring.

“What in particular?”

“Taking turns to move like that. If they rushed us we’d be buggered if we didn’t have the elves.”

“We call it pepper-potting. One team moves while the other covers them. It’s what they _should_ have been doing all along. Rushing us all at once, they’d need a _lot_ more numbers to survive what I’d do in return.”

“You’re the expert, I suppose. They’re, what, a hundred yards away?”

“Nearest group just took cover at eighty metres. Oshin and me were out here last night doing full range cards for all of the positions we set up.” The memory drills for learning occlumency meant he didn’t have to pull them out to refer to them, too, which was a bit of a result. “Anyway, time to go loud. Lance Corporal Dobby! Stand by on Charlie circuit.”

“Standing by on Charlie circuit Lieutenant SAH!” Somehow Dobby’s excitement had him able to actually shout in Harry’s ear.

Harry waited for the team he was watching to take a knee - they might have learned the basics but they still weren’t alongside taking cover or even going prone - and refresh their shield charms. Just as their moving element came level with them, Harry hissed “Dobby NOW!”

There wasn’t a lot mines could do against shield charms. High explosive wrecked rune-shrapnel in every test they’d done, small charges of black powder behind thick cardboard wadding were the limit of what the metal would take without distorting the runes. The result was that of the six Death Eaters in the beaten zone, five were unhurt. That was better than the previous groups, who either couldn’t cast a shield spell at all or if they could, had only a fifty-fifty shot of doing it well enough to stop shrapnel. Or, rather, a fifty-fifty shot the last time Harry had set up an ambush. He’d been applying some selective pressure: the first few teams he’d encountered, maybe one in ten survived to get away.

“They’ve all gone to ground,” Molly said, “thrown themselves flat.”

“Tell me when they start moving again,” Harry said, hefting his rifle and making ready, “We’ll do the four-point drill, retire to our fall-back position and fire the rest of the mines.” It was a measure of how slow the enemy were to learn that he’d only needed to do that twice before and _never_ needed the third or fourth position he always planned for.

“Got you. I’ll have a go at that russian fog spell Charlie taught me, breath of some heathen devil or other. Bugger to pronounce, but it boils their eyeballs in their own jelly, gives them waking nightmares, and makes ‘em bleed out the arsehole. Don’t have to aim it, either, and the regular shield charm won’t answer it.”

“They’ll be trying to capture, not kill, too,” Harry added, by way of noting the advantage they had over their opponents. “If it looks like that’s changed, we’re out of here no matter what.” Attrition was a fool’s bargain even if they _weren’t_ horribly outnumbered and their side’s last hope. “Lance Corporal Dobby, on my mark, send Private Orshin down. And then stand by on _all_ the clackers.”

“Yes sir, Lieutenant SAH!” Harry returned the salute he could _hear_ in Dobby’s voice.

“You think they’re going to rush us?” Molly asked.

Harry brought his rifle up to his shoulder and set his feet under him for a rapid pop-up. “I think there’s only so much they can take before they lose their heads and try something stupid. Hopefully they won’t figure out that they should have tried the rush _first_ with a lot more numbers.”

“They’re getting up,” Molly said.

Harry nodded, and then remembering he was invisible, added, “Right. Dobby, send Private Oshin.”

There was a pop and a sudden smell of Brylcreme. “Ullee da’n chaggey,” the Fenodyree growled, remaining invisible as per elf standing orders.

“Bee ullee!” Harry answered, having got the bare minimum Manx military vocab down by this point, and then, “Right, Molly, how close are they?”

“Sixty yards the closest. Ready if you are?” Sixty yards was optimistic range for most spells, absurdly short for a rifle. Now was the last moment if Harry wanted to keep his advantage.

“Ready.” He gestured with the rifle barrel that was poking out of his cloak, “Three, two one - GO!”

They’d practised this move. Admittedly with shouts of ‘Bang!’ and Molly replacing incantations with nonsense words, but they had a drill. Jane couldn’t do the curses required, what with their emotional components, which was why she was back home working on the calculations for the ritual.

Up to his feet. Five rounds rapid, surprising the hell out of the two Death Eaters he hit: shield-breaker bullets when they weren’t expecting _any_ gun to fire at all. Step right and turn about-face - not going widdershins was _important_ for magical-theory reasons Harry didn’t get yet - while Molly stepped around him. 

Reversed direction, and gouts of conjured flame and hastily transfigured earth were shredding the last remnants of the grey, corpse-pallor mist that Molly had cast. Too late for one poor sod who was on his knees, bleeding from the eyes and pointing his wand at his own head. A green flash and he collapsed like his strings had been cut. Harry shuddered: to suffer enough to want _that_ after only a few seconds? _Brr._ That left only two targets that hadn’t walled themselves off with earthen barriers. Three rounds to get a hit on one, two rounds didn’t seem to have an effect on the second for all Harry was certain he’d hit with the first.

Turning again, switching to right angles from their first two positions, Harry got off three rounds at the one Death Eater not already prone, winging him at least, before a sudden bloom of flame came from behind a small boulder. “Incoming!” he yelled, loosing a couple more rounds and realising the fire was growing scary fast. Unnatural fire, black-tinged and starting to form bestial shapes -

Sensing Molly already moving, Harry stepped around to his right, sweeping his sights across the remnants of Molly’s first gas cloud - two corpses, and burnmarks where fire spells had stopped it. He loosed a couple of shots in passing, and as he came to his next position he saw that Molly had mixed it up with a creeping tide of withering rot that had killed the grass in a broad fan leading away from their position. And then stopped: one of these jokers knew the counterspell and was bellowing the charge. What they didn’t realise was that bunching up as they charged was a bad idea. Throwing bolts of something nasty-looking as they came, they were probably hoping to put Harry off his stroke - they certainly couldn’t see him - but the spellcasting, with yelled incantations and wildly flailing wands, was all going high. And slowing them down.

“Can’t hold this for long!” Molly yelled between incantations.

Harry switched to automatic and dumped the last of the magazine in a narrow fan of grazing fire across the biggest cluster of enemy wizards. Then, “Private Oshin! Er oaie!”

A brief and dizzying sense of rushing motion and they were on the crag, looking down at the mess thirty metres below and two hundred metres away. 

“Lance Corporal! Fire!”

Dobby worked all the clackers at once by snapping his fingers, making them leap into the air and snap closed like crab claws. The chaos of flame and wildly-flying cursefire and heaving earthen shields on the flat below was punctuated by the crump of a dozen mines going off. Harry was pleased to hear several shrieks: whether of pain or fright he couldn’t tell amid the smoke and confusion.

“The _fuck_ was that fire spell?” he asked, noting that there was still a _lot_ of flame going on.

Molly wheezed a moment, whatever she’d done at the last must’ve been a bit of a strain. “Fiendfyre,” she said, pulling off her invisibility cloak to reveal that she was flushed and sweaty, “Whoever let _that_ off wants his bloody head looking at. It was all I could do to hold it back for the few seconds I did. A heartbeat longer and we’d have been done for.”

“Doesn’t look like he’s stopping,” Harry observed, pushing his hood back to get some fresh air of his own, “In fact it looks like it’s out of control and our guests are more worried about _it_ than _us_.” The fire was swirling about and lashing at the efforts the Death Eaters were making to contain it with streams of conjured water, animated soil and other spells Harry couldn’t identify.

“It’ll burn everything, you have to actually stop it with the right counterspell. And get it right first time, what’s more. It’s pure madness given flame and hunger. If you don’t kill it with your first try, it’ll try and kill you back.”

“So if the caster happened to not have his shield right and he’s dead or injured now?”

“If they don’t stop it, it’ll burn everything magical it finds, and seven acres besides down to the roots. Be three years at least before the grass can even _start_ growing back.”

“Erasing all evidence?”

“Oh yes. And we should get further away, that’ll have set off every alarm in the Ministry.”

“Good. Let’s give ‘em a few weeks on high alert with no action, then. Plenty of time to overthink their next reaction plan that won’t be right for our next op anyway. Meantime, Lance Corporal, gather up the clackers and make your way to the rally point. Molly, you go there too, get the kettle on. You look like you’re chinstrapped. Private Oshin, _bee ullee_ ,” Harry said as he reloaded, “I’m going to put them off their stroke at the very least while their attention’s on that hellfire spell. I’ll join you as soon as their reinforcements turn up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUTHOR NOTES
> 
> Yes, the disclaimer quote is from Terminator Salvation. It’s a time-travel franchise with multiple branching realities. It’s ALL canon, and there’s nothing we can do about that.
> 
> The Romani family called Shelby is a shout-out, well done if you spotted it. Theoretically, their littlun shouldn’t have caught mumps - it’s one of the Ms in the MMR vaccine - but a. That Jackass Wakefield was still being taken seriously in the early 2000s when her classmates should’ve been getting vaccinated, and b. one of the weaknesses of the NHS system is it sort of assumes a settled lifestyle, so the travelling communities have trouble getting all the care they’re supposed to. Which wouldn’t matter if everyone else got their shots at the right time.
> 
> Plain chocolate hobnobs are formally known as dark chocolate hobnobs, but nobody calls them that. (I personally prefer the non-chocolate ones, but if I have to have chocolate ones my tastes run more to dark than milk chocolate.)
> 
> Yes, I’ve had Harry learn a magical Hadouken. I’d apologise, but I’m not a bit sorry. Using a weapon as a magical focus is a bit Dresdenverse, I’ll admit, but I dare say there’s all sorts of survivals from the pre-wand era in Potterverse magical practise. If the ‘ki punch’ from all of those 80s-era fighting games doesn’t have a basis in martial-arts folklore, I don’t want to hear about it.
> 
> “Nonce” - sex offender, impliedly against children. Prison slang that leaked into the language-in-general in the 90s. I know I’m not the only one to spot the likely criminal abuses of the Memory Charm: a fair few stories have fingered Gilderoy Lockhart as a wrong ‘un on exactly this basis. (I personally think he’s exactly the sort who would think his victims too grateful for their time with The Great Gilderoy Lockhart to need memory charms at all…)
> 
> Egypt: my headcanon is that Egypt was a major centre of magical scholarship for millennia, which gave rise to and attracted wizards looking for ancient secrets and conducting experiments that earned them sobriquets like ‘Herpo The Foul’ (Who had a greek name, at least). The fringes of the desert are littered with abandoned laboratories, many of them abandoned for horrifyingly good reason. As a result the Egyptian Sahara is to magic what France’s Zone Rouge is to long-lasting battle damage. Like the Zone Rouge, it’s going to take literal centuries to clean up. Gringotts is the biggest contractor retained by the ICW. They’re not robbing tombs - most of them were cleaned out millennia ago - they’re defusing unexploded magic …
> 
> The Brecons are one of the few bits of this island I’ve never hiked, although I’ve driven through a couple of times on the way to and from Cardiff. I’ve taken some guesses based on photos on Google Maps and notes on the geology of the area.
> 
> “First Eleven” - it’d be first XV if you were talking about Rugby, of course. Nowadays it includes the reserves and substitutes and similar as well as the eleven or fifteen players on the pitch, so sometimes they change the name to First Team or the like. No idea whether it’s a world-wide convention, my experience of team sports is all at the pick-up-game-in-the-park level.
> 
> “Chinstrapped.” Severely exhausted. As in ‘only standing upright because your chinstrap is holding you up’.
> 
> Fanfic recommendation: Since Snape has come up: The Hogwarts Potions Professor and its ongoing sequel The Head Of The House Of Slytherin by seekeronthepath, on AO3 only as far as I know. An AU in which Severus Snape isn’t a _complete_ dickhead, with considerably improved consequences for everyone involved. 


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